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- THE - . ' 

Lutheran 

flanual 



BY 



JUNIUS B. REMENSNYDER, D.D. 

AUTHOR OF "HEAVENWARD," "DOOM ETERNAL, 
"SIX DAYS OF CREATION," ETC. 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 



JOSEPH A. SEISS, D.D., LL.D., L.H.D. 



NEW YORK: 

BOSCHEN 5c WEFER COMPANY, 

96-98 Fulton Street. 

1893. 



/ 



I 



Tnt Library 
or Congress 

WASHINGTON 






COPYRIGHT, 1893, 
By BOSCH EN & WEFER CO. 



PREFACE. 

THIS volume appears in answer to the question, 
frequently asked, for a book setting forth in 
simple style the main characteristics of the 
Lutheran Church. It aims to promote the in- 
terests and progress of the whole Church, with- 
out regard to divisions or parties. Accordingly, 
the doctrines, usages, spirit, and life, of the 
Lutheran Church, are here set forth in such large 
outline, as are common to all synods, branches, 
and sections. Never was there a time so full of 
promise and opportunity for our Church as the 
present. And on every side she is rising to the 
occasion. This great Lutheran awakening extends 
to all classes. Our young people have caught it, 
and are moving forward with enthusiasm. How 
timely and important, then, that every member 
be intelligently informed as to the distinctive 
glories of the Church of his love and pride! 

To this end we send forth this little volume, 
trusting that it may contribute toward one, greats 
undivided Evangelical Lutheran Church — that the 
Ecclesiastical Mother of Protestantism may be 
for America what she has been and is for the 
world. 

j. B. R. 

New York, June 28th, i8gj. 



INTRODUCTION. 

THE Lutheran Church, like Christianity itself, 
of which it is a true and faithful exponent, 
needs no apology. It is its own best evidence of its 
right to existence. To know it thoroughly, is to 
know the purest and fullest truth of God, given 
for human enlightenment, guidance and salvation. 
If the way of spiritual safety and eternal life can- 
not be found in its confessions and teachings, 
men will seek in vain for it. Protestant Christen- 
dom lives upon the principles of faith which the 
Lutherans first enunciated, and must die without 
them. Even the Roman Catholic communion has 
been largely reformed and refashioned by the 
testimony of the Lutheran Reformers, and is the 
better to-day by reason of the Lutheran Reforma- 
tion, which effectually revoiced the teachings of 
Apostles and Prophets for our modern world, and 
started the springs of freedom for mankind. 

It has been the habit of some to look upon the 
Lutheran Church as a Church of foreigners. 
Though in this country contemporaneously with 
the oldest denominations in America, there has 



VI. 



been a strange slowness of English speaking peo- 
ple to take in what the Lutheran Church is, or to 
recognize the Rock whence they were hewn. 
Hence the necessity for the multiplication of 
books of the kind here presented, that false im- 
pressions may be done away, and facts brought 
out for more intelligent appreciation. Even many 
Lutherans themselves do not half realize what a 
cause they represent, and what a heritage they 
have. It is, therefore, a matter of congratulation 
that so many pens of late years have been em- 
ployed in the popular setting forth of the history, 
faith, and cultus, of this firstborn of the great 
Reformation, which is now so rapidly coming to the 
front among the religious denominations in this 
country. Nor will this Manual be the least in worth 
for the giving of important information on the topics 
to which it is devoted. Without assuming responsi- 
bility for every detail of statement contained in 
it, we take pleasure in commending it to the 
attention of all who are in search of a brief exhi- 
bition of the main features and spirit of our 
Evangelical Lutheran Church, all so irenically 
given, that few Lutherans, of whatever party, 
will find occasion for serious dissent. 

JOSEPH A. SEISS. 
Philadelphia, July jisl, iSpj. 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Name Lutheran, ...... I 

II. The Lutheran an Historical Church, ... 8 

III. The Lutheran Church the Source of the other 

Protestant Churches, . . . . . 14 

IV. The Lutheran Church and the Word of God, . . 21 
V. Justification by Faith, the Central Lutheran Doctrine, 28 

VI. The Sacraments, ....... 37 

VII. Baptism, 44 

VIII. The Lord's Supper, . 53 

IX. Polity, or Government, ...... 62 

X. Worship, 70 

XL Rites and Festivals, 87 

XII. The Lutheran an Orthodox Church, . . . 100 

XIII. Lutherans ancLthe Church, . . . . . 113 

XIV. Lutheran Piety, 127 

XV. Christian Nurture, or Children in the Lutheran 

Church, ........ 140 

XVI. Our Young People, . . . . . . 149 

XVII. Culture, 156 

XVIII. Sacred Art, . . . . . . . . 164 

XIX. Unity, .179 

XX. English and Foreign-speaking Lutherans, . 193 

XXL A World-wide, or truly Catholic Church, . . 202 

XXII. Unparalleled Growth in the United States, . . 207 

XXIII. Loyalty to the Lutheran Church, . . . . 214 

XXIV. Our Future in America, . . . . • . 220 



THE LUTHERAN MANUAL. 



CHAPTER I 



THE NAME LUTHERAN. 



AS the name Christian was first given the 
disciples of Christ in derision, so those 
who adhered to the pure gospel in the era of the 
Reformation were derisively styled "Lutherans." 
As Luther was the hero of the Reformation — 
the Providential agent of that blessed work — 
it was natural that those who clung to his 
doctrines should be associated with his name. 
Hence, as the Reformation spread throughout 
distant quarters of the world, wherever one 
would espouse the restored faith, the scornful 
remark would be made : " He is a Lutheran," 
and not only was it a mark of obloquy, but also 
a badge of danger. 



As the truth advanced however, and gained 
larger conquests, history repeated the lesson of 
old. For, just as had occurred with the term 
Christian, so it issued with Lutheran. That 
which had been applied as an epithet of scorn, 
became a synonym of honor. Thus, while the 
Reformers used the official title : "The Evan- 
gelical (from Evangelion, the Greek word for 
gospel) Church,"* in common parlance it was called 
"The Lutheran Church," and this popular title in 
practice has virtually supplanted the official one. 
This has been sometimes urged as objectionable. 
It is said by opponents that the Church of Christ 
should not be called after any human and imper- 
fect person, no matter how illustrious. This 
would be true if it at all were meant to supplant 
the name Christian. But this it is not. It is first of 
all, as termed in the Scripture : "The Church of 
Christ;" "The Church of God;" or as called in 
the Apostles' and Nicene Creed: "The Holy 
Catholic and Apostolic Church." In this primary 
and generic sense none other than a divine 
name dare be applied to it. But for practical 
uses, that the diverse phases of Christianity may 

*"Its usual title is 'Evangelical Lutheran Church;' 'Evangel- 
ical' being the name ; 'Lutheran' the surname :" Schaff-Herzg En- 
cyclopedia, Vol. II, p. 1370. 



be distinguished from one another, it becomes 
necessary to employ particular descriptive titles. 
Such secondary appellatives, attached to the 
generic christian name have accordingly become 
universal. Thus we speak of the Romanist, 
Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregation- 
alism etc. churches, all of which secondary names 
are based upon merely human forms of govern- 
ment and administration. The name Lutheran is 
no more objectionable on the ground of finite 
limitations than any of these. But on the other 
hand, it has this incomparable advantage over all 
others, that it emphasizes and keeps in con- 
spicuous view the pure evangelical doctrine 
which Luther confessed, and for fidelity to which 
he stood. This was illustrated in the noble 
response made by the Margrave of Brandenburg, 
who challenged for calling himself a Lutheran 
Christian, answered: "I was not baptized in the 
name of Luther: he is not my God and Savior; I do 
not rest my faith in him, and am not saved by 
him ; and therefore, in this sense I am no Luth- 
eran. But if I be asked, whether with my heart 
and lips, I profess the doctrines which God restored 
to light by the instrumentality of His blessed 
servant Luther, I neither hesitate, nor am ashamed 
to call myself a Lutheran, In this sense I am, 



and, as long as I live, will remain a Lutheran!' 

Another benefit of using this name arises from 
Luther's unique and marvelous personality. 
"Luther," said the great Melanchthon, "is all in all, 
a miracle among men." Wrote Calvin: "Luther 
is the trumpet which has roused the world from 
its lethargy — it is not as much Luther who speaks 
as God whose lightnings burst from his lips." 
Says the great theologian, Dr. Dorner: "Luther 
was the first christian of the modern world — one 
of those rare historical figures in which whole 
nations recognize their type." The eminent old 
Catholic, Dr. Dollinger, testifies : "It was Luther's 
over-powering greatness and wonderful many- 
sidedness that made him the man of his age and 
his people. His opponents were colorless and 
feeble by the side of his transporting eloquence. 
They stammered, he spoke." The secular histor- 
ian, Froude, says of him: "Luther's eyes were 
literally world-wide. Reading his Table-Talk, 
one ceases to wonder that this remarkable man 
changed the face of the world." The distin- 
guished church historian, Dr. Schaff, writes of 
him: "No man — save the apostles — deserves so 
much to be held in grateful remembrance as 
Martin Luther, remarkable alike as a man, as a 
christian, as a theologian, as a Bible translator, 



catechist and hymnist, as the bold champion of 
the freedom of conscience, and as the chief leader 
of the Reformation"* Wrote Carlyle: "I will 
call this Luther a true Great Man : Great, not as 
a hewn obelisk ; but as an Alpine mountain. A 
right spiritual Hero and Prophet, for whom these 
centuries and many that are to come, will be 
thankful to Heaven "f The great critic Lessing 
uttered this high eulogy : "In such reverence do I 
hold Luther, that I rejoice in having been able to 
find some defects in him, for I have been, in fact, 
in imminent danger of making him an object of 
idolatrous veneration;" and even the Roman 
Catholic Count Stolberg feels compelled to bear 
this testimony to him: "Against Luther's person 
I would not cast a stone. In him, I honor, not 
alone one of the grandest spirits that have ever 
lived, but a great religiousness also, which never 
forsook him." 

When Elijah was caught away in a chariot of 
fire to heaven, Elisha implored that a double 
portion of the mighty prophet's spirit might fall 
upon him, and so it is of incalculable benefit to 
the Church of Christ militant that the spirit of so 

* Symposiac on Martin Luther, p. 21. 
f Heroes and Hero Worship, p. 127. 



unique a hero of the Lord as this should still in- 
spire her columns. The faith, the reverence, the 
courage, and the keen spiritual vision of Luther, 
are what Christendom needs at all times, and 
what are specially required to meet the crises and 
perils of our day. And experience shows that the 
name Luther, attached to our Church, has kept 
his commanding figure at our head, and that its 
influence has been a constant and beneficial in- 
spiration. Much of the unswerving loyalty of 
the Lutheran Church to the scriptures, and to the 
pure gospel of the Reformation, is owing to the 
manner in which the rare personality of Luther 
has perpetually been held up before her. 

Whether then, we consider the name Lutheran, 
in its origin, or in the light of the history and 
achievements which three-and-a-half centuries 
have gathered about it, there is nothing in it to 
be defended, or apologized for, but it is a name to 
be proud of, and to inscribe boldly on our eccle- 
siastical banners. Other distinctive denomina- 
tional names are empty and colorless by the side 
of it. No title is so fitted to awaken spiritual 
enthusiasm as that of the Evangelical Lutheran 
Church, and every worthy member of this great 
communion can say with a just pride : "I glory in 
the name Lutheran; so rich a heritage of spiritual 



7 

blessing has this title bequeathed to our Church, 
that we cannot but believe that its selection was 
the handiwork of Providence." 



CHAPTER II. 

THE LUTHERAN AN HISTORICAL CHURCH. 

THAT the purpose of God to bring salvation to 
the world might be carried out, He established 
the Church. Under the Old Testament dispen- 
sation this existed as the Jewish Church. At 
the coming of Christ it was transformed into the 
Christian Church. This Christian Church has un- 
dergone many vicissitudes, but never has it been 
destroyed. For about three centuries, during the 
era of the Roman persecutions, we speak of it as 
the Early or Primitive Church. Thence from the 
era of Constantine it gradually assumes the 
Mediaeval form, the Church of the Middle Ages. 
About the tenth century occurred the great 
schism between the Greek and Roman wings of 
the Church. 

When the Roman Catholics contend that 
theirs alone is the one old historic Church, the 
answer is that the "Greek or Oriental Church is 
the oldest in Christendom, and for several cen- 
turies was the chief Nearer of our religion. She 



still occupies the sacred territory of primitive 
Christianity, and claims most of the Apostolic Sees, 
as Jerusalem, Antioch, and the Churches founded 
by Paul and John."* She produced the first 
christian literature and used the language spoken 
by Christ and His apostles. Did any branch of 
Christianity possess the exclusive claim to the 
descent from the original historic tree, it would 
then be the Greek rather than the Romish 
branch. 

The great Reformation of the sixteenth century 
from which issued the Lutheran Church, did not 
originate any new thing. It was a Re-formation, 
not a creation. It only restored the old. It tore 
away the heap of Mediaeval rubbish of supersti- 
tion and ceremonial under which the pure faith 
and simple ritual of the Church had been buried. 
It was by the study of the writings of the early 
Church fathers, as Augustine, etc., that Luther 
was largely led to break free from Romish error. 
And therefore his aim was to return to the purity 
of the Primitive and Apostolic Age. He simply 
built upon the old "foundation of the apostles and 
prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief 
corner-stone." "That is exactly what we mean by 

*Schaff-Herzg Encyclopedia — Greek Church, Vol. II, p. 900. 



IO 

the German Reformation, which was not a new 
development of Christianity, but simply the pro- 
cess of scraping off the barnacles that had been 
accumulating for fifteen hundred years, and more 
and more obstructing Christianity's progress 
through the midst of this storm-tossed world that 
it was set here to sail on."* 

Had Luther been a destructive radical, reck- 
lessly going on a career of innovation, he would 
not have been followed and supported by millions 
of the best and wisest of christians. But he was 
a judicious conservative, who revered the past. 
He knew that there had always been, and always 
would be, a true visible Church of Christ. There- 
fore he did not by any means break with the 
historical continuity of the Christian Church. 
When he renounced the Pope this was not re- 
nouncing the true Church, but only declaring the 
more truly and loyally for it. So he and his fol- 
lowers never severed themselves from the ancient 
Christian tree, but the decayed and corrupt 
branches severed from them, and left them the 
representatives of pure historic Christianity. 
''Whilst Luther emended the gravest errors and 
vices of the Church of Rome, and restored the 

♦Orthodoxy— C. H. Parkhurst, D.D. 



1 1 

Church to a happier condition, he did not frame a 
new Church," says Budeus. "When the Luther- 
ans renounced the Papacy and its abominations, 
they took with them the same Bible, the same 
Catholic Confessions, the same Holy Faith, and 
the same Apostolic Ministry and Sacraments, 
which distinguished the Church in the beginning, 
and hence the same historic Church-life, which 
took its rise in the incarnation of the Son of God, 
which trickled feebly through the rubbish and 
darkness of the middle ag-es, and which never 
was, or could be, entirely lost."* 

Had the Lutherans rejected anything simply 
because Rome held or used it — the position of 
some ultra- Protestants — they would thereby, to 
that extent have cut themselves off from the true 
visible Church. But whatever of ancient Chris- 
tianity, both in faith and usage, had come down 
through the middle ages, pure and incorrupt, 
they reverently and lovingly retained. And only 
that which was unscriptural and a perversion of 
the Gospel, did they reject. "The sacred treas- 
ure of true Catholicity, which the Church of early 
times had nurtured in the form of Greek- Roman 
culture, is taken over — freed from excrescences, 

*Dr. Seiss. in Ecclesia Lutherana, p. 34. 



12 

and enriched by those acquisitions of the Middle 
Ages that had stood the proof. Its vocation was 
to set forth the happy mean."* This left the Lu- 
theran not only a living branch, but the main trunk 
of the historical Christian Tree. It was not the 
Lutheran, but the Romish phase, which severed 
itself from pure primitive Christianity. If there 
was an apostacy, a falling away, from the Church 
of Christ in the Reformation, it was Rome, and 
not the Lutherans who were guilty of it. 

And as, then, the Evangelical Lutheran Church 
is built upon the pure Word of God and Sacra- 
ments of the Lord Jesus Christ and his holy 
Apostles ; and as her Ministry is descended in 
unbroken line from apostolic ordination ; and as 
she retains the devout usages of the Church in 
her primitive purity ; she is without doubt a true 
historical Christian Church. It is a fact capable 
of demonstration that no Church in Faith, Worship, 
and Order, is in such accord with the Church 
framed by Christ and the Apostles, as the Luth- 
eran. With all charity and fraternal feeling toward 
christians of other households we may yet truly 
say that to no other communion applies so fitly as 
to the Lutheran, the title: "The Holy Catholic 

*Church History, Kurtz, Vol. Ill, p. 144. 



13 

and Apostolic Church." 

In her we see in its most glorious and perfect 
form the visible kingdom of God — the gate to 
the holy Jerusalem and heavenly temple above. 
And he who adds himself to her membership 
may do so in the full confidence that in her is 
fulfilled this great investiture of the Lord Jesus 
Christ: "Upon this rock I will build My 
Church : and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
against it. Matt, xvi: 18. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE LUTHERAN CHURCH THE SOURCE OF THE 
OTHER PROTESTANT CHURCHES. 

PROTESTANT and Lutheran were originally 
synonyms. It was the Lutherans alone 
who made the famous protest at Spire in 1529 
from which they were called Lutherans. And 
the indelible connection of this title Protestant 
with all the non-Romish Churches, serves to 
stamp them all as generically of Lutheran origin. 
When Luther on the 31st of October, 1 5 1 7, 
nailed his 95 theses to the doors of the Castle- 
Church at Wittenberg, the act aroused the 
civilized world. Says a writer of that time : "The 
theses were transmitted to all parts of the earth 
as if the angels were their messengers." Luther's 
hammer awoke the slumbering nations. From 
his first stroke, the great Reformatory movement 



is 

was begun, and Popes, Councils, and Princes, might 
as well have sought to turn the earth backward 
on its axis, as to attempt to retard its course. 
Everywhere Luther's books were in men's hands, 
and people were eagerly studying the new and 
yet old doctrines. In Switzerland, in France, and 
in England, these influences were most powerfully 
felt. The great Swiss Reformer, Zwingli, and 
the great French Reformer, Calvin, both thank- 
fully acknowledged their indebtedness to Luther. 

In England, especially, the movement made 
itself felt. "Luther's writings were eagerly 
read in England.""' Indeed as early as 1521 
official complaint was made to Cardinal Wolsey 
"that the University of Oxford is infected with 
the heresies of Luther, divers students having a 
great number of books of the said perverse 
doctrine." The same year Cardinal Wolsey 
issued a rescript condemning Luther's writings 
and ordering all copies to be delivered up within 
1 5 days. Notwithstanding these sharp measures, 
a noted writer of that time says: " Lutheranism 
increased daily in the University of Oxford." In 
1526 appeared Tyndale's translation of the New 
Testament, evidently inspired by Luther's trans- 

*Church History, Kurtz, Vol. II, p. 313. 



i6 

lation of 1522. An Episcopal writer admits of it 
that Tyndale "had Luther's translation before 
him and constantly consulted, and often adopted 
it." The same is true of the first authorized 
version of the whole English Bible by Coverdale 
in 1535. "The Origin of the English Bible is 
therefore," says Dr. Jacobs in his recent learned 
volume, "to be traced to German soil and 
Lutheran influences."* 

Protestantism, however, as an organized eccle- 
siastical movement, dates its origin from the 
adoption of the Augsburg Confession, June 25th, 
1530. From this time, it was no longer the indi- 
vidual work of Luther, but a purified phase of 
Christendom viz: the Lutheran Church. And 
this Augsburg Confession, which was wholly and 
distinctively Lutheran, laid the doctrinal 
foundation of all the other Protestant Churches. 
Says D'Aubigne, the Reformed historian, of it: 
"The Augsburg Confession will ever remain one 
of the master-pieces of the human mind, enlight- 
ened by the spirit of God. "f Writes the Presby- 
terian, Dr. Schaff: "The Augsburg Confession will 
ever be cherished as one of the noblest monuments of 
faith from the Pentecostal period of Protestantism. 

*'The Lutheran Movement in England." Jacobs, p. 219. 
f History of the Reformation, p. 497. 



i7 

Its influence extends far beyond the Lutheran 
Church. It struck the key note to the other evan- 
gelical confessions! 1 And says Gieseler, the great 
Reformed Church historian: "If the question be, 
which among all Protestant Confessions, is 
best adapted for forming a union among Protes- 
tant Churches, we declare ourselves unreservedly 
for the Augsburg Confession." Dr. Krauth 
writes: "In it the very heart of the gospel beat 
again. To it, under God, more than to any other 
cause, the whole Protestant world owes civil and 
religious freedom."* And the scholarly Bishop 
Whittingham, of Maryland, speaking for the 
Protestant Episcopal Church, says : "The Augs- 
burg Confession is the source of the Thirty-nine 
Articles of the Church of England and America — 
their prototype in form, their model in doctrine, and 
the very foundation of many of their expressions, "f 
This is most natural, since the Thirty-nine Articles 
(Episcopal) were not adopted until the year 1563, 
when the Reformation had already been fought 
and won under the Augsburg Confession, which 
appeared 33 years, or a whole generation earlier. 
The Westminster Confession (Presbyterian) was 

♦Conservative Reformation, p. 258. 

fLutheran Origin of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican 
Church — Dr. J. G. Morris. * 



i8 

not adopted until 1648, a full century later, and 
some of the confessions of the other leading 
Protestant Churches are quite modern. It was 
inevitable, therefore, that all these should have 
been substantially drawn from the Augsburg 
Confession, i. e. were Lutheran in their origin. 

History, moreover, shows that the English 
Reformation was not only due directly to Luther 
and Lutheranism, but was on the very point of 
ecclesiastically joining the new movement. Soon 
after the adoption of the Augsburg Confession, viz. 
in 1535, an official English commission was sent to 
Wittenberg, where after lengthy conferences with 
Luther and Melanchthon, thirteen doctrinal articles 
were mutually adopted in which the King of 
England "agrees to promote the gospel of Christ 
and the pure doctrine of faith according to the 
mode in which it was confessed in the Diet of 
Augsburg." These negotiations after continuing 
for years, finally failed, and the Church of Eng- 
land was not amalgamated with the Lutheran 
Church. But not only did the essential identity 
of their confession remain, but their forms of wor- 
ship were chietly taken from Luther's service, 
and in America the Episcopal ChurdF officially 
styles herself, Protestant, which as we have 
shown, etymologically signifies Lutheran. "Luth- 



19 

eranism was, in fact, the exact shade which 
colored the minds of Queen Elizabeth, and of the 
divines who held to her. Her altar was precisely 
the Lutheran altar : her opinions were represented 
in almost a continuous line by one divine after 
another clown to our time."* The Lutheran 
belief of Elizabeth is shown by her noted words : 

Christ was the Word that spake it, 
He took the bread and brake it, 
And what that Word did make it, 
That I receive and take it. 

In the face of these indubitable historical facts, 
how utterly groundless is the claim sometimes 
put forth that the Episcopal Church of England 
and America stands alone in this respect, that it 
is independent of the Lutheran Reformation, and 
has had a continuous existence from the apostolic 
time apart alike from the Romish Church, and 
from the great religious awakening of the XVI 
century! When Luther appeared, and the Luth- 
eran Church arose, there was but one great 
ecclesiastical system dominating Christendom, and 
holding the civilized world in its grasp viz : the 
Roman Catholic Church. To Luther and the 
Lutheran Church, therefore, all the now existing 

o 

non-Romish Churches owe their origin and 

o 

*Christian Institutions. Dean Stanley, p. 89. 



20 

their general character. And of all these 
Churches not one has been so directly dependent 
upon the Lutheran, and has so nearly reproduced 
it in doctrine and worship as the Episcopal. 

The Lutheran Church then is without exception 
the source of the other Reformed churches. To 
her belongs the proud title : '' Mother of Protest- 
antism." "The Reformation of the Sixteenth 
Century is the mother or grandmother of at least 
half a dozen families of evangelical denominations 
not counting the subdivisions."* And as 
daughters should venerate their mother, so 
affectionately should the various Protestant 
churches regard and venerate her as "the rock 
whence they were hewn." "It is the truism of 
history that the Lutheran is the parent Evangeli- 
cal Church. She is the mother of Protestantism. 
Historically all other Evangelical churches have 
sprung from her."f 

♦Schaff's Church History, Vol. VII, p. 9. 
tThe Lutherans in America, Wolf, p. 505. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE LUTHERAN CHURCH AND THE WORD OF GOD. 

THE corner stone of the Lutheran Church is 
Holy Scripture. From the day that Luther 
found the Bible in the University at Erfurt, the 
Reformation was born. In that sacred volume 
lay the germ of the mighty movement that was 
about to recreate the world. It was by the study 
of the Word of God that Luther became en- 
lightened as to the errors of Romanism, and it 
was with this sword of the spirit that he led forth 
the Church from her bondage, to the liberty and 
progress of the modern era. It was on the rock of 
the Holy Scriptures as over against the edicts 
of Popes and the decrees of Councils that Luther 
planted himself at Worms — that "scene" which 
Froude calls "the finest in modern history," — 
when he uttered the memorable words : " Here I 



22 

stand, I cannot do otherwise ; God help me, 
Amen!" 

Accordingly, Luther's first great work was to 
translate the Bible and place it, in the simplest 
language, in the hands of the people. Preaching, 
too, at once resumed the chief place from which 
it had been supplanted in the Mediaeval services. 
From Luther's own pulpit in Wittenberg and 
from Lutheran pulpits everywhere the Word of 
God resounded, as it did of old when Christ and 
his Apostles "came preaching the kingdom of 
God." And when the Augsburg confession was 
set forth as the chief symbol of the Lutheran 
faith, it was a mere republication of the teaching 
of Holy Scripture. Accordingly when the Roman 
Catholic Duke of Bavaria said to the theologian 
Eck : "Can you refute by sound reasons, this 
their confession?" "With the writings of the 
Apostles and Prophets — no," replied Eck; "but 
with those of the Fathers and Councils — yes." 
" I understand," replied the Duke, " the Lutherans 
according to you, are in the Scripture ; and we 
are outside." 

And this peculiarity still characterizes the 
Lutheran Church, not only as over against the 
Roman, but even measurably the Reformed 
Churches. The position of Lutheranism in 



respect to the Word of God is unique. In no 
christian communion does it hold so unequivocably 
the place of absolute authority. Such was the 
reverence of Luther for the Bible that he does 
not scruple to say that we must look upon the 
Scripture as " if God himself had spoken therein," 
and he calls the Holy Spirit "the most clear and 
simple writer there is in heaven and on earth."* 
And this same reverence has passed into the 
Church holding his name. For, while we gladly 
concede the prominence which all christian 
Churches, Greek, Roman, and Reformed, give to 
the Scripture, yet the Bible does hold a special 
pre-eminence in the Lutheran Church, such as it 
has not elsewhere. 

With it the Word of God is the chief Means 
of Grace. It is the source of the efficacy of the 
Sacraments. It is the seed of the spiritual life. 
It is the organ of our personal relation to Christ 
by which He lives in the believer. It is the 
instrument of sanctification, the formative power 
of growth in grace, "Sanctify them through thy 
truth, thy Word is truth" (John xvii; 17). And 
it is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. 
The Word, therefore, in the Lutheran Church is 

*Walch— XVIII, pp. 1456, 1602. 



24 

the supreme and all sufficient spiritual agent. 
Nor is it held as necessary to its effect that it be 
attended with concomitant agencies and appliances 
of human wisdom and "human machinery." But 
rather do these supplant and enfeeble it, even as 
Oetinger complained that the followers of Zinzen- 
dorf placed more reliance upon the singing of his 
emotional hymns than they did upon the Word 
of God. For when simply and purely preached 
it exerts its utmost spiritual influence: "That 
your faith should not stand in the wisdom of 
men, but in the power of God" (I. Cor. ii ; 5). It 
therefore, is the staple of Lutheran preaching, and 
the centre of every Lutheran service. 

No Church so closely moulds its confessions, 
its theology, its liturgical services, its hymnology, 
its devotional literature, and its simple christian 
life after the Scriptures, as does the Lutheran. 

With her the Church stands by and depends 
upon the authority of Scripture, and not Scripture 
upon the authority of the Church. 

Emphatically among her ecclesiastical sisters 
may she wear the title : The Bible Church. Fitly 
thus does the historian Kurtz, term her: "The 
Church of the pure doctrine." And Dr. Schaff 
says of her: "The Lutheran Church meditated 
over the deepest mysteries of divine grace and 



25 

brought to light many treasures of knowledge 
from the mines of revelation. She can point to 
an unbroken succession of learned divines who 
devoted their whole life to the investigation of 
saving truth."* The Lutheran Church accord- 
ingly has no sympathy with the low and loose 
views current in many Protestant quarters, re- 
specting the sacred oracles. She does not con- 
sider the Bible as merely the imperfect record of 
a divine revelation, but she regards it as that 
revelation. She does not think that the Scriptures 
merely contain the Word of God, but that they 
are the Word of God. She does not view the 
Scriptures as a promiscuous intermixture of 
human error and divine wisdom, but as absolute 
and unmixed truth. To her the Bible is "The 
Word of God which liveth and abideth forever." 
(I. Pet. i; 23.) For her the Bible is no book of 
man's origin, but in it she hears the voice of 
"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners 
spake in times past unto the fathers by the 
prophets." (Heb. i; 1.) And therefore she does 
not receive the Bible with conditions and com- 
promising qualifications, but she receives it as 
reverently as did St. Paul, to wit: "For I neither 

*Lutheranism and Reform, p. 174. 



26 

received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by 
the revelation of Jesus Christ." Gal. i; 12. 

The Lutheran Church does not then with one 
breath receive the Scriptures, while with the 
other she invalidates them by a low theory of 
inspiration, but to her they present "not the words 
which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the 
Holy Ghost teacheth." (I. Cor. ii ; 13.) Therefore 
her position is that which Dorner quotes as that 
of Luther, viz.: "God in revelation is God in the 
Word. In the Word thou shouldst hear nothing 
else than thy God speaking to thee."* Or as the 
great theologian, Gerhard, writes : " Although God 
did not directly write the Scriptures, yet it is God 
and indeed God alone, who inspired the prophets 
and apostles, not only as they spoke, but also as 
they wrote ; and He made use of their lips, their 
tongues, their hands, their pen."f 

The Lutheran Church then regards the Scrip- 
tures as the revelation of God's Word and Will, 
and hence the one only infallible rule of faith and 
practice. By this standard, therefore, she frames 
her creed, moulds her theology, and shapes her 
system of ethics. And with these high views of 
Scripture, she does not stumble at what that 

*History of Protestant Theology, Vol. I, p. 107. 
fSchmid's Lutheran Theology, p. 69. 



27 

Word reveals. What God affirms she receives 
with implicit faith, believing that His power is 
equal to His word, and that what He says He can 
do. Hence she does not hesitate where the 
Scripture doctrine involves a mystery. But 
despite the arguments of the skeptical reason, 
and the sneers and taunts of infidels, "as a little 
child" she "receives with meekness the engrafted 
Word." (James i; 21.) 

As Luther, in the colossal bronze group at 
Worms, stands with the open Bible in his hand, 
and his face upturned to heaven — the noblest 
artistic impersonation of moral grandeur in the 
world — so does the Evangelical Lutheran Church 
stand upon the impregnable rock of Holy Scrip- 
ture. And it is this Rock upon which, as a 
Lutheran Conference has recently declared in 
Berlin, "the wisdom of this world will be rent 
asunder." 



CHAPTER V. 

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH THE CENTRAL LUTHERAN 
DOCTRINE. 



TF the Word of God, as 'the sole fountain of 
1 authority for the christian conscience, as over 
against the authority of Popes and Councils, was 
the chief means of the Reformation, the doctrine 
of that Word most potent in the movement was 
Justification by Faith. This central truth of the 
New Testament, involving the very heart of 
Christ's incarnation and redemptive work, had 
been lost sight of during the Middle Ages. 
Instead of teaching that the sinner was justified 
freely by faith in Christ's blood and righteousness, 
justification had been made dependent on human 
works and merits and narrowed to priestly inter- 
vention. Consequently a system of penances, 
indulgences, masses, repititions, and monkish 



29 

routine, had come in vogue, instead of simple 
spiritual piety. Not only did these heavily burden 
and oppress the conscience, but they placed a 
bar between the soul and its immediate living 
intercourse with the Savior. All Christendom was 
groaning under this intolerable perversion. 

But when Luther had reopened the Bible, and 
studied it carefully for himself, he discovered this 
lost cardinal principle of Christianity. Especially 
one day, when on a pious pilgrimage to Rome, 
while, as a work of penance, climbing Pilate's 
staircase, the Pauline passage: ''The just shall 
live by Faith," flashed upon his mind. Then it 
was, that he also saw the falsity and absurdity of 
this whole system of meritorious works. He 
realized that it was a total misconception of the 
gospel. That it was the servile routine of the 
slave and not the loving, joyous obedience of the 
Son. At this discovery a great burden rolled 
from Luther's soul. He saw that what all his 
monastic penances and self-mortifications failed 
to procure, was freely offered to him by simply 
trusting in the all atoning merits of the crucified 
Lamb of God. Then Luther for the first time 
experienced true and perfect spiritual peace. He 
had now, so to speak, found the key of the lost 
Paradise. And he now eoes forth from his closet 



30 

where God has made him a free man in Christ 
Jesus, to give this boon of spiritual freedom to 
the world. 

Henceforth this becomes "the one central 
point in Luther's heart and life, in his theology 
and in the testimony of the Church called after 
him, namely, the clearness, firmness, and joyful- 
ness, of that justifying laith which was, then, for 
the first time since the days of the apostles, 
restored in its fullness to the Christian Church." 
Wielding in his unique personality this vital 
Evangelical doctrine he broke the Papal bondage 
of a thousand years, reformed the corrupted 
Church of Christ, created a new historic epoch, 
opened the door of the modern era, and trans- 
formed the whole condition of man. That we 
are "justified by faith," that this faith introduces 
us into a personal union with Christ, and that 
this new spiritual life issues in good works — this 
pivotal gospel truth — is the explanation of all our 
unwonted modern progress. The superior 
enlightenment of Protestant over Romish nations, 
the greater spirituality and practical piety of 
Protestant peoples, and the unfettered advance 
of education, liberty, and the arts and sciences, 
since the reformation, are all owing to this vital 
evangelical principle, 



3i 

And if this is the chief factor that differentiates 
Lutheranism from Romanism, it also to no small 
degree distinguishes the Lutheran from the 
Reformed Churches. For, while the Reformed 
Churches owe their origin to this same principle, 
and more or less hold and confess it, yet they by 
no means have the clear grasp of it had by 
the Lutheran Church. It does not with them 
hold the primary place that it does in Lutheranism, 
where it is, as Luther termed it, the articidus stantis 
aut cadentis ecclesiae, i. e. article of the standing or 
falling of the Christian Church. For example, in 
the Calvinistic system, while Justification by Faith 
has a place, it is yet made secondary to the abso- 
lute sovereignty and decree of God, which, 
without any sphere for the freedom of the will, is 
the sole cause of faith. "The Lutheran Church 
has always been a unit in the rejection of those 
gloomy errors which centre in the theory of 
absolute election to faith. While she never 
swerved from the fundamental truth that salvation 
is by grace alone, she just as firmly maintained 
the other fundamental truth, that salvation is by 
faith alone, as the only means by which the soul 
can appropriate the merits of Christ."* "Angli 



♦Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of the Lutheran Church, p. 



29 



32 

canism has sought to confine Christ's grace to 
narrow channels. Methodism often dims His 
crown by its conjunction of experiences and 
works with grace."* Lutheran theology on the 
other hand is Christo-centric. All revolves about 
Christ as the shining centre'. And as a matter of 
fact there is a wide spread degeneracy in much 
Protestant teaching in regard to this great central 
article of Justification by Faith. In how many 
pulpits is the death of Christ on the cross robbed 
of all its significance as a vicarious sacrifice, and 
reduced to a mere moral example. That he was 
the infinitely precious offering over against an 
infinite guilt of sin ; that He by His suffering 
paid man's full penalty; and that we have 
remission of sins through His blood; is not only 
ignored but openly denied, and even represented 
as morally unjust and revolting. A far worse and 
more fatal error this than that Romish perversion 
against which Luther raised his protest! 

And others, thoroughly evangelical in most 
respects, still misconceive and misjudge this great 
principle of Lutheranism. Thus, the late Canon 
Liddon speaks slightingly of "Luther's imputa- 
tion doctrine," as one for which he had "no 

♦Lutherans in America, Wolf, p. 519. 



33 

sympathy, as it often led to lax morality, etc.," 
and then adds condescendingly that "good 
Lutherans are always better than their' theory."* 
Yet Christ was not afraid that it would "lead to 
lax morality" when he made salvation conditional 
on faith alone saying: "He that believeth on the 
Son hath everlasting life." (John iii ; 36.) Nor 
was St. Paul fearful that this doctrine of Christ 
would lead to fruitlessness in good works, when 
he declared: "Therefore w r e conclude that a man 
is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." 
(Rom. iii; 28.) This idea that the Lutheran 
doctrine fosters indifference to good works, 
whether urged by Romanists or Protestants, is 
an utter perversion both of Scriptural and Luth- 
eran teaching. The Scripture teaches definitely 
and cumulatively that the ground of our justifica- 
tion is solely and absolutely the blood and right- 
eousness of Christ, and that the condition or 
means of our justification is faith which lays hold 
upon the great "propitiation for sinners." But 
this is not a mere intellectual assent, such as 
Canon Liddon speaks of, or Paul, when he says : 
"The devils believe and tremble." But it is a 
"Faith which worketh by love." (Gal. v ; 6.) A 

*Magazine of Christian Literature March, 1890. 



faith quickened by, aglow with, and fruitful 
through love. And the outcome and test of this 
living faith are good works. The sinner forgiven 
much loves much. The greater the free love and 
pardon of Christ, the greater his impulse toward 
a life of grateful, good works. The new life born 
of faith is the Christ-life of love to God and the 
service of fellowmen. "By their fruits ye shall 
know them." And this vital Protestant prin- 
ciple has so illustrated its practical force in the 
moral regeneration of the world as to render 
quite superfluous any vindication of it. 

Two fundamental departures from the evangeli- 
cal tenet of justification are conspicuous in the 
Protestantism of to-day. One is that which dis- 
connects Faith from its scriptural relation to the 
Church. For while Faith is the sole condition of 
salvation it is mediated through the Word and 
Sacraments. Saving faith is generated bv the 
Holy Scriptures and nurtured by the Sacraments. 
That Faith is thus eiven through the Means of 

o o 

Grace, and not to be violently disjoined from 
God's historical instrumentality for salvation — the 
Church — is the true evangelical order. 

The other current error is the position so 
frequently heralded from Protestant pulpits that 
doctrines, beliefs, and confessions, have little or 



35 

nothing to do with Christianity, that it matters 
not what a man believes, but only what he does. 
Life is made the all important thing - , and Faith 
quite relegated to the background, as altogether 
indifferent. The Lutheran Christian sees here 
simply bald Judaism or Paganism. This is the 
inversion and invalidation of the Gospel teaching. 
"Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt 
be saved," (Acts xvi ; 31.) was the apostolic 
message. This preaching, which was "to the 
Greeks foolishness" and "to the Jews a stone of 
stumbling," carried with it "the power of God," 
and changed the face of the world. In the divine 
plan Faith precedes and orders Life. We are 
"justified by Faith," and the vital principle thus 
imparted "works by Love," to the production of 
the new christian life. Thus, what we believe we 
do, is the Christian answer to Jew, Pagan, and 
Infidel. "The great thing in true Religion is the 
Faith — the Creed — the facts and doctrines on 
which the soul rests for peace and salvation. 
There can be no right Religion without a right 
Faith."* "Credo" — I believe — is the confession 
which lies at the very starting point of the 
christian course. 

*The Golden Altar, J. A. Seiss, D.D., LL.D., p. n. 



T^wrr^^nww 



36 

The open and tacit assaults thus made upon 
this great material principle of the Reformation, 
show what vital departures are taking place from 
the Evangelical doctrines of Luther and the 
Reformers, and that the Lutheran must needs 
stand for the truth to-day as of old. As, then, 
the central doctrine of her theological system, 
the great distinctive article of her Church, and 
the root principle of all her works of practical 
piety, Lutheranism writes upon the banner which 
she holds up before a lost race this sentence — 
the very heart of the Gospel of Christ — "Justi- 
fication bv Faith." 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE SACRAMENTS IN THE LUTHERAN CHURCH. 



SACRAMENT is the Latin form of the New 
Testament Greek word, " Musterion" 'whence 
comes our English word Mystery. The Sacra- 
ments consequently are the sacred mysteries of 
Christianity — the holiest ordinances of our 
religion. The two Sacraments — Baptism and the 
Lord's Supper — were instituted by our Lord 
Jesus Christ. 

The nature and intent of the Sacraments are 
thus defined in Lutheran theology : "They are 
holy rites, appointed by God, through which, by 
means of visible signs, grace is imparted to man."* 
That is, God has instituted the Holy Sacraments 
to convey strengthening grace to the soul. In 
each Sacrament, therefore, there are two elements, 

♦Doctrinal Theology of the Lutheran Church, Schmidt, p. 537. 



38 

the divine invisible grace, and the earthly visible 
sign. And the relation between the two is that 
the latter is the instrument, or means of the 
former. That is, the visible element is the vessel 
through which the invisible grace is conveyed 
and given, as it is written: "This treasure we 
have in earthen vessels." (2. Cor. iv ; 7.) Thus, 
in the Sacrament of Baptism the outward element 
is water, and the invisible grace offered, or given 
through the water is spiritual washing or 
regeneration. So, in the Lord's Supper, the out- 
ward, or visible elements are Bread and Wine, 
and the invisible elements given through them 
are the Body and Blood of Christ. 

These two elements are not to be confused 
or mixed together, neither are they to be sepa- 
rated one from the other. But they are to be 
connected by this sacramental union, viz. that one 
is the vessel, or means of the other. To get the 
invisible grace the outward element must be 
used. "What, therefore, God hath joined 
together, let not man put asunder." The Sacra- 
ments thus are not mere figures or signs, but 
they are means of grace. What they signify they 
also convey. They are the earthly instruments 
of God's blessed spiritual gifts. And as they are 
the institutions of God, so man's faith or unbelief 



39 

can neither make nor unmake them. It can but 
determine their effect. He who observes them 
with faith receives their grace to his unspeakable 
good, and he who observes them impenitently 
profanes their gift to his nameless hurt. " Religion 
[according to the Lutheran conception] is not the 
Puritan idea of God's Law, but the Gospel idea 
of God's Love. Yet God's love is not as loose 
as are the prevailing views of it. It has an 
appointed way of making men righteous. And 
this way is not a vague, individualistic influence 
of the Holy Spirit over men's impulses and emo- 
tions, but it is a way of definite and objective 
means of Grace through which alone the Holy 
Spirit ordinarily works. These means of Grace 
are His Word, which both regenerates and 
strengthens, and two Sacraments, one of which 
implants the new life, while the other feeds it. 
To Lutherans then, the Gospel of God's love, 
revealed in Christ and received through Christ's 
means of grace, is the sum and substance of all."* 

Such is the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy 
Sacra.ments. It complies with the Scriptural 
teaching, which always unites divine grace with 
the outward sacramental elements. And it does 

*The Lutheran Church, Rev. Theo. C. Schmauk. 



40 

no violence to our senses which show us that no 
change has taken place in the elements, which 
simply remain as before, viz. natural Water, Bread 
and Wine. 

But this view of the Sacraments, as held by 
the Lutherans, we at once notice is totally distinct 
from that held both by the Roman Catholics, and 
by the other Protestant Churches. The Roman 
Catholics inix the outward element and the invis- 
ible grace, saying that one is changed into the 
other. This view contradicts the evidence of the 
senses. And the other Protestant Churches vio- 
lently disjoin and separate the invisible and the 
visible elements, for they deny that the latter are 
instruments of the former. They teach that the 
earthly elements are only figures or signs, and 
not means of grace. That the participant receives 
no grace whatever through the sacramental 
elements. Whatever blessing he experiences at 
the time he receives through his mind or spirit, 
entirely apart from the external use. This latter 
view contradicts the teaching of Scripture. It 
also deprives the Sacrament of all direct efficacy. 
And the question at once arises, if God did not 
mean them to be the instruments of any blessing, 
why did He institute them, and ordain their 
observance? But how much more natural it is 



4i 

to think that what divine wisdom and beneficence 
have set up with such solemn sanctions, are not 
empty signs, but richly filled vessels — are not 
utterly devoid of efficacy, but clothed with spirit- 
ual might and power. From this presentation, 
the incomparably purer, richer, and more 
Scriptural view of the Sacraments held by the 
Lutheran Church, than that held by either the 
Roman or Reformed Churches, will appear. 

It is sometimes charged upon the Lutheran 
Church that she teaches Sacramentarianism, i. e. 
that the Sacraments will produce their effects with- 
out faith, or a worthy spiritual state, and that she 
exalts the Sacraments over the Word of God. 
Both these charges are fully refuted by our highest 
authorities. Article XIII of the Augsburg Con- 
fession teaches of the Use of Sacraments : 
"Therefore men must use Sacraments so as to 
join faith with them, which believes the promises 
that are offered and declared unto us by the 
Sacraments. Wherefore they condemn those 
who teach that the Sacraments do justify by the 
work done, and do not teach that faith is requisite 
in the use of Sacraments." The same views are 
constantly upheld by our representative theologi- 
cal writers. Thus, says that prince of ^Lutheran 
theologians, Chemnitz: "The efficacy of the 



42 

Sacraments is not such as if through them God in- 
fused, and, as it were, impressed grace and salva- 
tion, even on unbelievers or believers. "* So also, 
Hollazius : "The Sacraments confer no grace on 
adults, unless when offered, they receive it, by true 
faith, which existed in their hearts previously."* 
All Lutherans urge the necessity of moral fitness 
for the Sacrament, and likewise attach all its 
efficacy to the Word of God. As Augustine says 
the Sacrament is "the visible word," so our theo- 
logians teach that "strictly speaking there is but 
one means of salvation, which is distinguished 
as the audible and visible word." - } - It is as Luther 
says in the Catechism: "The eating and drink- 
ing, indeed, do not produce these great effects, 
but the Words which stand here." 

The Lutheran Church, then, teaches so just 
and discriminating a significance of the Word and 
Sacraments that we may fitly apply to her the 
striking apothegm of Claus Harms, when in 1817 
he raised the banner of evangelical Christianity 
against the devastating inundation of unbelief, viz: 
I. "The Roman Catholic Church is a glorious 
Church; she holds and forms herself pre-emi- 

*I)octrinal Theology of the Lutheran Church, y. 550. 
flbid — Ouenstedt. p. 538. 



43 

nently by the Sacrament. II. The Reformed 
Church is a glorious Church ; she holds and forms 
herself pre-eminently by the Word of God. 
III. More glorious than either is the Evangeli- 
cal Lutheran Church ; she holds and forms her- 
self pre-eminently by the Sacrament and the 
Word of God."* 

This one point alone, the true scriptural teaching 
of the Lutheran Church respecting the Holy 
Sacraments, gives to her a pre-eminence in 
Christendom, clothes her with a lever of spiritual 
power, and makes her the custodian of an 
incomparable divine treasure, which, while it 
holds the promise of such great things for her 
future, should also stimulate inviolable devotion 
on the part of her members. 

*Kahnis' History of German Protestantism, p. 225. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE OF BAPTISM. 



LUTHERANS teach that Baptism, according 
to the Scriptures, is the initial Sacrament. 
It is the door of entrance into the visible king- 
dom of God. It is the seal of the new covenant 
of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the gate of 
admission into the Holy Christian Church. It is 
the beginning of the christian life. Accordingly 
it differs from the Lord's Supper in that it is 
administered but once, at the beginning of the 
spiritual life, whereas the Lord's Supper, as the 
sacrament of renewal, must be continually 
repeated. 

Let us look at the Nature, Mode, and Subjects 
of Baptism, in the Lutheran Church. 

I. Nature. Baptism as a Sacrament, illus- 
trates the truths laid down in the last chapter. 



45 

"By Baptism," says the IXth Article of the 
Augsburg Confession, "grace is offered." It is 
then no mere symbolic rite, but it is a means of 
grace, conveying to the subject the spiritual gift 
which it typifies. What is this Baptismal grace? 
The Scriptures answer: "Except a man be born 
of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into 
the kingdom of God." (John iii ; 5.) "Be baptized 
and wash away thy sins." (Acts xxii ; 16.) 
"According to His mercy He saved us, by the 
washing of regeneration and renewing of the 
Holy Ghost." (Titus iii; 5.) 

These and corresponding passages show that 
Baptism is the bodily application of water with 
faith, and that the divine grace therein offered is 
new spiritual birth, or regeneration, by the gift 
of the Holy Spirit. This is the Lutheran teach- 
ing, as Luther defines in the catechism: "When 
connected with the Word of God, it is a Baptism 
i. e. a gracious water of life and a 'washing of 
regeneration' in the Holy Ghost." Baptism then 
is the sacramental rite instituted as the ordinary 
means of the beginning of the new spiritual life 
in the soul. Where there is a trinal application 
of water, with the words of Institution, and a 
believing heart, there the Holy Ghost is out- 
poured to cleanse original and actual sin, and to 



46 

recreate the personality in the divine image. 
■Reason" indeed says Luther, "can never 
understand how Baptism is a laver of regeneration, 
but what God says is true whether my senses 
corroborate it or not. He is omnipotent and can 
fulfill His Word.""* This Baptismal Grace is not 
conveyed magically, but only in accordance with 
the Scriptural conditions. It can. too. be lost, 
and assuredlv will, unless " That eood riling which 
was committed unto thee," thou "keep by the 
Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us." ill. Tim. i : i _ 
Very precious, rich, and comforting, thus is 
Baptism according to the Lutheran view, pre- 
senting a wide contrast to the superficial vi- 
too largely prevalent respecting this Holy 
Sacrament. 

II. Subjects. Is this Sacrament to be admin- 
istered alone to adults, or also to children? The 
Aucrsburor Confession oives this direct answer: 
"Children are to be baptized, who by Baptism, 
beine offered to God. are received into divine 
favor." 5 also Luther writes: "We must 
declare it as a simple fact, that a child, which by 
nature is oppressed with sin and death, begins 
eternal life at the time of its Baptism. "f That 

•House Postfls. Vol. I, pp. 296 and 298. 
+ House Postfls, Vol. II - 



47 

baptism of Children was the primary design and 
rule — adult baptism being the exception, in such 
cases where the Sacrament had been neglected — 
is shown by the general tenor, and individual state- 
ments of Scripture; by the Apostolic Baptisms; and 
by the practise of the primitive Christian Church. 

a. The analogy of Baptism to Circumcision in 
the Scriptures sustains the Lutheran view. Cir- 
cumcision was the Old Testament rite of admission 
into God's covenant. Now, as it was administered 
to children at eight days old, the conclusion is 
irresistible that Baptism, ordained by Christ to 
take the place of circumcision, must also be 
designed for children. Where is the authority 
for supposing that little children who even "under 
the law," were admitted into the Jewish Church, 
should under the "new covenant" of "grace and 
truth," be excluded from the Christian Church? 
How directly contrary this would be to those 
tender words of Jesus ; "Suffer the little children 
to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of 
such is the kingdom of God." (Mark x ; 14.) 
And also to the declaration of St. Peter, on the 
Pentecostal day, when the Church was founded : 
"For the promise is unto you, and to your 
children." (Acts ii ; 39.) 

b. The Household Baptisms of the apostles 



4§ 

show the same. Thus, when Paul ''baptized 
Lydia and her household" (Acts xvi; 15), and when 
the jailer was "baptized and all his" (Acts xvi; 
33), or when Paul says : "I baptized the household 
of Stephanus" (I. Cor. 1 ; 16), is it not manifest 
that the "household" and "all his," and like 
phrases, were specially meant to include the little 
ones of the domestic circle? 

c. Primitive Church Practice. Origen, one of 
the most learned fathers of the early Christian 
Church, who was born in the year 185, when 
those would be living whose fathers could have 
witnessed the apostolic practice, writes: "The 
Church has received it from the apostles that 
infants are to be baptized." And what is alto- 
gether conclusive, is that in the year 252 an 
ecclesiastical council of sixty-six bishops convened 
at Carthage delivered the decision : " It is our 
unanimous opinion that baptism must be refused 
to no human being, so soon as he is born." 
Truly, therefore, does Dr. F. \Y. Conrad say : 
"The early Fathers of the Christian Church, 
including Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Justin 
Martyr, and others, represent in their writings 
that Infant Baptism was a universal custom derived 
from the apostles, and the practice was continued 
in the entire Christian Church, with a few excep- 



49 

tions, for fifteen hundred years. Furthermore, 
inscriptions in the Catacombs of Rome, giving the 
ages of neophytes or baptized children, also 
demonstrate the fact that infant baptism was 
practiced after the death of the apostles, in the 
first centuries of the Church."* And the historian, 
Guericke, justly remarks : "Without some apos- 
tolical tradition, it is wholly inconceivable how the 
claim of Baptism to an Apostolical origin could 
ever have gained such unhesitating assent, and 
been generally adopted even in the 2nd century."f 
The only objection urged against these cumu- 
lative testimonies is that a little child cannot have 
faith. But has not our Lord answered this, when 
he says: "One of these little ones which believe 
in me." (Matt, xviii ; 6.) Luther interpreted this 
as an unconscious faith, discernible to God alone. 
Augustine argues that in the case of children : 
"The faith of the Church [represented by christian 
parents or sponsors,] takes the place of their own 
faith. "J As, then, faith in the adult is necessary 
to salvation, but children can be saved without 
faith, so though faith in an adult be necessary to 
Baptism, yet children can be baptized, and receive 

*On the Lutheran Doctrine of Baptism, p. 133. 

fChristian Antiquities, p. 238. 

^Neander's Church History, Vol. II. p. 670. 



5o 

baptismal grace, without conscious faith. And 
though Baptism is thus the ordinary means of the 
regeneration of infants, yet those dying unbaptized 
are not lost. Lutheran theologians hold that nol the 
want, but the contempt of the sacrament condemns. 
Our duty is bound by the sacrament, but God's 
grace is not thus bound. He can regenerate and 
save where and how He will. Infants dying un- 
baptized are saved. Those responsible for their 
baptism will be held answerable for the neglect.* 

The New York Independent has lately shown, 
by carefully tabulated statistics of all religious 
denominations in the United States, that the pro- 
portion of Infant Baptisms in the Lutheran Church 
is more than twofold larger than that of any other 
Protestant Church. And the Watchman, a leading 
Baptist journal, remarks that this is owing to the 
Lutheran doctrine of Baptismal grace. Where 
there is no belief of direct spiritual efficacy in the 
sacrament of Baptism, it is quite natural that the 
rite should fall into neglect. This fact accounts 
for the alarming decadence of Infant Baptism 
among non-Lutheran Churches. The most 
powerful Presbyterian Church in New York City, 
and perhaps in the U. S., with 2000 members, 

*See Luther's views on this interesting point fully cited by 
Krauth on Augsburg Confession, p. 63. 



5i 

lately reported but 21 Infant Baptisms for the 
year. A very significant illustration this, that 
belief in a power of God in the Sacraments is 
necessary to maintain their observance. 

III. Mode. The Lutheran Church practices 
Affusion, i. e. pouring or sprinkling. The mode 
of baptism is not positively indicated in Scripture. 
The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan seems to 
indicate pouring. And His baptism is so repre- 
sented in the frescoes of the Catacombs, one of 
which is supposed to date from the second century. 
So also Peter's question: "Can any man forbid 
water, that these should not be baptized?" (Acts 
x; 47), certainly indicates the application of 
water to the subject, rather than the immersion 
of the subject in the water. A very important 
testimony as to the practice of the primitive 
Church is that given in the recently discovered 
"Teaching of the Apostles," a book dating from 
a time quite as old as the formation of our New 
Testament canon. It says: "If thou have not 
living water, baptize into other water ; and if thou 
canst not in cold, in warm. But if thou have not 
either, pour out water thrice upon the head into the 
name of Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit."* This 

*Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol.- VII, p. 879. 



52 

proves beyond a doubt that either immersion or 
aspersion was considered a legitimate mode. 
That is, the amount of water was not deemed an 
essential factor of Baptism. Only those features 
of the Sacrament which were capable of universal 
use were made absolute. But the mode, depending 
upon conditions of climate and of the subject, as 
for example, whether sick or well, was left open 
for adaptation. Thus immersion, which could be 
safely used in a mild country like Palestine, but 
would be impracticable in a rigorous one like 
Russia, was not designed to be an essential 
feature of the rite. But, as pouring or sprinkling 
can be used in all countries and under all con- 
ditions, it has, with legitimate authority and 
judicious propriety, come into well-nigh universal 
use. And this is the mode practiced in the 
Lutheran Church. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE OF THE LORD S SUPPER. 

THE most solemn institution founded by Jesus 
Christ, the most important public ordinance 
of the Christian Church, and that doctrine which 
has excited deeper interest and graver discussion 
than any other in theology, is the Lord's Supper. 
And it is just this holy and weighty doctrine 
which has become more distinctive of Lutheranism 
than any other. In fact, as over against the other 
Protestant denominations, it may be called the 
corner-stone of the Lutheran Church. For the 
view of the Lord's Supper which she holds and 
confesses, in harmony with the saints of old, has 
been either lost sight of, or definitely repudiated 
by the great majority of other Protestants. This 
view has been fitly termed — the real presence. 
It is thus defined in Article X of the Augsburg 






54 

Confession : " In the Lord's Supper the Body and 
Blood of Christ are truly present under the form 
of bread and wine, and are there communicated 
and received." It will be seen that two objects 
are here spoken of as being present in the Lord's 
Supper. One is the Body and Blood of Christ, 
the other is the Bread and Wine. The Body 
and Blood are the invisible divine element, the 
Bread and Wine are the visible earthly element. 
And the relation of the two elements is that the 
earthly is the means of the heavenly. That is, 
by using or appropriating the Bread and Wine 
the Body and Blood of Christ are received and 
appropriated by the communicant. The one is 
not changed into the other, so that the divine and 
earthly are mixed and confused — -which is the 
Roman Catholic error of Transubstantiation. Nor 
are the divine and earthly separated, so that the 
Body and Blood are not received where the Bread 
and Wine are taken — which is the error of the 
other Protestant Churches — but the two are com- 
bined in an inseparable and yet unmixed union. 
This is called the sacramental union. And it is 
precisely in harmony with what we have shown 
to be the meaning of a Sacrament, viz. an invisible 
grace conveyed through a visible, earthly vessel. 
Now let us look at the reasons which prove 



55 

this Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence to 
be the only true one. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, 
all relate that on the evening of our Lord's 
betrayal he took bread and wine and declared of 
them these words : "Take eat : This is my Body," 
— "Drink: For this is my Blood." To St. Paul, 
also, the Lord after His ascension, appeared and 
uttered the identical words of this sacramental 
formula. As Dean Stanley therefore says of this 
fourfold iteration : "These famous words form the 
most incontestable and authentic speech of the 
founder of our religion."* Now, the plain, 
natural meaning of these words is that Christ in 
the Holy Supper gives us His Body and Blood to 
eat and to drink. And the only question between 
Lutheran Christians and others is whether He 
meant what He said, or whether He did not mean 
what He said. 

The chief argument advanced to maintain the 
opposite view is that our Lord's words were 
figurative. But it is a rule of Scripture interpre- 
tation that no revealed word must ever be 
interpreted figuratively, where the direct natural 
meaning is admissible. On any other principle 
all the truths and doctrines of Scripture could be 

*Christian Institutions, p. 95. 



56 

frittered away into tropes and figures, and no 
positive revelation would be left. And it seems 
quite inconceivable that in this most solemn scene, 
and with these words so precise and definite, and 
given us in fourfold repitition, our Lord could 
have been disguising his meaning in symbolic 
language. "To suppose that at such a holy time 
as this He spoke in metaphor, is contrary to the 
solemnity of the occasion, the meaning of the 
institution, and the short, precise phrases em- 
ployed."* St. Paul had no conception of a merely 
figurative significance, when he challenged unbe- 
lief on this very point thus : "The cup of blessing 
which we bless is it not the communion ['partici- 
pation in,' as the Revised Version margin literally 
renders it] of the Blood of Christ? The Bread 
which we break, is it not the communion^ of the 
Body of Christ?" 

For a Lutheran, the incontestable word of 
Scripture is sufficient. Yet to make the certainty 
more indubitable, we have the unbroken witness 

*Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia — Lord's Supper, Vol. II, p. 1345. 

yThe Greek critical scholar, Alford, thus comments on this 
passage: "koivgovux, the participation of the Body and Blood of 
Christ. The strong literal sense must here be held fast as con- 
stituting the very kernel of the Apostle's argument. If we are to 
translate this ecrriv represents, or symbolizes, the argument is 
made void." 



57 

of the Church down through all the ages. Thus 
Irenaeus (130 A.D.-202), writes: "When the 
mingled cup and the broken bread receive the 
words of God, it becomes the Eucharist of the 
Body and Blood of Christ." Ambrose : (340-398) 
"We, receiving of one bread and of one cup, are 
receivers of the Body of the Lord." Chrysos- 
tom : (344-407) "The Bread which we break, is 
it not the communion of the Body of Christ?" So 
unanimous is this concurrence that the Church 
historian, Ruckert, says: "That the Body and 
Blood of Christ were given and received in the 
Lord's Supper, was, from the beginning, the 
general faith. No one opposed this in the ancient 
Church, not even the Arch-Heretics."* And 
Luther gives this powerful sentence in regard to 
it: "This article [the Real Presence] has been 
unanimously held from the beginning of the 
Christian Church up to this year 1500, as may 
be shown from the* writings of the fathers, both 
in the Greek and Latin languages — which testi- 
mony of the entire, holy Christian Church ought 
to be sufficient for us, even if we had nothing 
more."f 

With Lutherans philosophical objections to 

*Lord's Supper, p. 297. 

f Letter to Albert of Prussia. 



t i 1 1 — -^ imm 



58 • 

this doctrine are destitute of weight. We believe 
that God's power is equal to His Word, and that 
what He says, He can also do. We are only 
asked to believe the fact, the manner is and 
remains incomprehensible. We have but to do 
with the What? We must leave to God the 
How? The sacramental union of the divine and 
earthly elements is indeed a holy mystery, but no 
deeper or more impenetrable than the Incarnation, 
or the Resurrection, or the Trinal Unity. We 
have but to do as Thomas a Kempis so fitly 
counsels: "Human reason is feeble and may be 
deceived ; but true faith cannot be deceived. 
Thou ousfhtest, therefore, to beware of curious 
and unprofitable searching into this most profound 
sacrament, if thou wilt not be plunged into the 
depths of doubt. But go forward with simple and 
unquestioning faith, and with reverence approach 
this holy sacrament, and whatsoever thou art not 
able to understand, commit without care to 
Almighty God."* Where there is this childlike 
Christian temper, there will be no difficulty in 
receiving the Scriptural and Lutheran view of 
the Lord's Supper. 

The difference in the reverence for the Sacra- 

*Book IV ; Chap. XVIII. 



59 

ment, and in its practical spiritual efficacy to the 
communicant, where the altar is approached with 
these strong, rich views, or where it is considered 
a mere sign and empty ceremony, is incalculable. 
To the latter it is but the memorial and shadow 
of a dead Christ, to the former it is a blessed 
communion with the living and o-lorified Christ. 
To the former it is like the mirage of the desert 
which invites and then disappoints the thirsty 
traveler; to the latter — partaking with a believing 
heart — it is a veritable fountain, whence the Real 
Presence flows out transmuting all the landscape 
into livino- o-reen, filling the air with the carols of 
hope and the fragrance of joy, the soul irradiated 
and entranced by "finding Him whom it liveth." 

The Real Presence is the peerless jewel of the 
Evangelical Lutheran Church. No other Pro- 
testant confession now professes to teach it. Of 
the XXXIX Articles of the Church of England, 
for which the claim is sometimes made, Dean 
Stanley truly says that in them "the lion of 
Lutheranism and the lamb of Zwinelianism lie 
side by side, and it is well that they thus consist, 
or they could not mutually subsist."* Rejecting 
Transubstantiation, Consubtantiation, Impanation, 

♦Christian Institutions, p. 92. 



6o 

and every error, which in any way mixes and con- 
fuses the divine grace with the earthly means, or 
which makes Christ's corporeal presence a carnal 
or physical one, she holds, that after a heavenly and 
incomprehensible manner, her Lord makes true 
His word, and gives to His believing disciples in 
the Holy Supper, His Body as the Bread of their 
spiritual life, and His Blood for the remission of 
sins. 

To bear witness, in the very heart of Pro- 
testantism, to this central truth, she has never 
wavered during three and a half centuries, and 
never will, by God's help, to the end of time. 
And the significance of this stand of the mother, 
and greatest Church of Protestantism, can not be 
over-estimated, in its bearing on the Christian 
world. It deprives Romanism of its most power- 
ful shibboleth against Protestantism, viz. that it 
has emptied the blessed Sacrament of its spiritual 
efficacy. It anchors Lutheranism safely in the 
conservative faith of the whole Christian Church 
as over against the deadly inroads of modern 
Rationalism. 

And it augurs more than anyone can forecast 
for the future. Negations are barren, positive 
beliefs grow. After all — amid the mutable 
fashions and vagaries of transient times — truth 



6i 

abides regnant, the one ever advancing and 
dominant force on earth. And most of all does 
this hold in things spiritual. With, then, this far- 
reaching truth of the Real Presence, lost from the 
coronet of her Protestant sisters, but glittering a 
peerless jewjel on her brow, the Lutheran Church 
will go. forward with an incalculable vantage. 
More and more will theologians be won to her 
doctrine, and devout Christians rally to her side, 
and more and more thereby will she become the 
recognized leader in God's witness-bearing 
Church to mankind. 



CHAPTER IX. 



LUTHERAN CHURCH POLITY, OR GOVERNMENT. 

AS the Scriptures prescribe no definite form of 
Church organization, the Lutheran, being 
pre-eminently a Scriptural Church, does the same. 
Ecclesiastical order she holds to be a matter of 
freedom, to be determined by the varying 
exigencies of the occasion. While doctrine per- 
tains to the conscience, order pertains to expedi- 
ency. Accordingly, Lutheran Church Polity, or 
Government, is different in different countries. 
In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, 
and Transylvania, it is Episcopal, the Church 
being under the government of Bishops and 
Arch-Bishops. And that the Lutherans in 
Sweden have what is called the " historic episco- 
pate" is admitted by Episcopalians, as the Bishop 
of Connecticut writes of "Swedish Orders": "If 



63 

anything outside the domain of pure mathematics 
may be said to be capable of demonstration, the 
reality of the Swedish succession is demonstra- 
ted."* In Germany, again, the Lutheran Church 
is under the administration of Superintendents, 
Consistories, etc. In America, the form of Church 
Constitution is Synodical, and many congrega- 
tions are entirely independent. 

"The idea of the universal priesthood of all 
believers has overthrown in the Lutheran Church 
the doctrine of a distinction of essence between 
clergy and laity. The ministry is not an order, 
but it is a divinely appointed office, to which men 
must be rightly called. No imparity exists by 
divine right ; an hierarchical organization is un- 
christian, but a gradation may be observed, 
(bishops, superintendents, etc.) as a thing of 
human right only. In Sweden the bishops em- 
braced the Reformation, and thus secured in that 
country an "apostolic succession" in the high- 
church sense ; though, on the principles of the 
Lutheran Church, alike where she has as where 
she has not such a succession, it is not regarded 
as essential. The ultimate source of power is in 
the congregations, that is, in the pastor and other 

*The Historic Episcopate in the Lutheran Church, Lutheran 
Quarterly. — Manhart. 



64 

officers, and the people of the single cummunions."* 
Similarly writes Kurtz of the Constitution of the 
Lutheran Church: "The biblical idea of a uni- 
versal priesthood of all believers would not tolerate 
the retaining of an essential distinction between 
the clergy and the laity. The clergy were properly 
designated the servants, ministri, of the Church, 
of the Word, of the Altar. Hierarchial distinc- 
tions among the clergy were renounced, as 
opposed to the spirit of Christianity. But the 
advantages of a superordination and subordination 
in respect of merely human rights, in the institu- 
tion of such offices as those of Superintendents. 
Provosts, etc., were recognized. "f 

In this view of Church Polity, and ecclesiastical 
orders, the Lutheran Church has the support not 
only of Scripture, but of the Ancient Church. 
Thus, says the great father Augustine [354-430 
A. D.] : "The office of bishop is above the office 
of priests, not by authority of the Scriptures, but 
after the custom of the Church. "J And the fore- 
most' scholars of the Church of England have 
frankly admitted the same. Thus, writes the 
learned Bishop Hooker: "It is rather the force 



Conservative Reformation — Krauth, p. 153. 
f Church History, Vol. II, p. 363. 
JEcclesia Lutherana, p. 108. 



65 

of custom, whereby the Church doth still uphold, 
maintain and honor the bishops, than that any 
such law can be shown that the Lord himself hath 
appointed presbyters to be under the regiment of 
bishops."* Church Government, then* in the 
Lutheran system being free, it is only a matter of 
human judgment and wise discretion what form it 
is best to adopt. Some form, however, there 
must be. For history shows that the progress, 
prosperity, unity, and efficiency of the Church, 
are quite as much affected by wise or foolish, 
orderly or anarchical, loose or efficient govern- 
ment, as civil states and societies are. In the 
United States quite too little attention, hitherto, 
has been given this important matter, so that the 
administration of the Lutheran Church is here 
perhaps the least orderly in the world. In fact, 
our point of weakness here lies in the sphere of 
organization. And from no other single cause, 
has our efficiency been so much crippled, and our 
progress been so greatly impeded. "We need 
order ,"f the distressed cry of the patriarch 
Muhlenberg as he saw the distracted state of the 
American Lutheran congregations, is still re- 
echoed on every hand. Order, oversight, 

*Ecclesiastical Polity, Book. VII, Chap. V. 
•{•Life and Times of Muhlenberg — Mann, p. 212. 



66 

judicious administration, ageneral superintendence 
of pastors and congregations, is one of the most 
intensely practical questions of the times. Our 
mighty Lutheran hosts are too much like a great, 
undisciplined, disorganized army, so that their 
overwhelming force cannot be utilized as it should 
be, cannot be moved by a common impulse, or 
brought to bear to a common end and purpose. 
In a recent paper on this point, a theological 
professor of large experience makes these judi- 
cious remarks: "Our convictions on this subject 
have been deepened more from the practical, 
than from the theoretical side. Life in the 
seminary makes many revelations concerning 
the needs of our conoreeations and the modes of 
supplying them, that are most surprising. We 
have most excellent material that admits of a high 
development, if we only treat it properly. But 
we are constantly losing some of the very best 
of it, because of our neglect to avail ourselves of 
the most simple and reasonable business-like 
methods with respect to its external administra- 
tion. The question of greatest importance in our 
Church in this country at present, is that of its 
thorough organization upon the foundations laid 
for it by Muhlenberg. The indifference to more 
thorough organization for the efficient administra- 



6; 

tion of the means of grace, is only a symptom of 
general religious indifference. If the Lord has 
actually given us a work to do, he means that we 
should do it with the most thorough adjustment of 
all our resources for its execution." 

What the form of government of the American 
Lutheran Church shall be, is yet in the crucible of 
discussion and experiment. The growing tendency 
would appear to be toward a superintendency 
similar to that in Germany. Others think that a 
government by bishops, after the order of the one 
in Scandinavia, which has so efficiently preserved 
the unity and greatness of our Church there, 
would be the best.* A recent able editorial in 
the Lutheran Observer, while guarding carefully 
against any such Episcopate as would compromise 
the Lutheran doctrine of the universal priesthood 
and justification by faith alone, remarks : "That 
some kind of an "episcopate," or its equivalent in 
some form of adequate supervision, would be an 
advantage to the Lutheran Church of this country, 

*It is certainly a noteworthy fact, deserving the thoughtful 
reflection of every lover of his Church, that alone in Scandinavia 
of all Christian countries do we find the blessed phenomenon of 
practically but one Church — the Evangelical Lutheran. Thus in 
Sweden there are but 600 Roman Catholics, 30,000 Baptists and 
Methodists, and nearly 5,000,000 Lutherans ! What might possibly 
have not a similar government done to prevent the distractions and 
divisions of Germany? 



68 

is believed by many who think that the general 
work of the Church could be carried on more 
systematically and efficiently under such a form 
of administration, than under the present methods. 
* * * * We think if the President of every 
Lutheran Synod could devote his entire time and 
labor to a general supervision of the Churches 
within its bounds, it would be a kind of an 
" episcopate" that would suit the situation and 
promote the progress and welfare of the Church." 
Had it not been, indeed, for the exigencies of the 
Reformation, Luther would doubtless have 
preserved ecclesiastical administration by bishops. 
He wrote: "The Church can never be better 
governed, and preserved, than with an Episcopal 
government, after the pattern of the Apostolic 
and Primitive Church. "f But as Luther found 
that the Bishops personally were opposed to the 
Reformation, and that their power was the bul- 
wark of the Papacy, therefore, as the truth is 
greater than order, he wisely sacrificed the latter 
to preserve the former. The great historian, 
Neander, writes of the early Church that when 
the " contentions of parties " were proving " injuri- 
ous to discipline and good order in the Churches, 

•j-The Episcopate for the Lutheran Church in America — Kohler, 

P- i5- 



6 9 

the triumph of the Episcopal system undoubtedly 
promoted their unity, order, and tranquillity."* 

All this shows the vital importance of some 
judicious, adequate form of Church government. 
To this end, it seems necessary to have some 
official Head or Executive, charged with the 
oversight of synodical congregations. And it 
would seem necessary that this person should be 
detached from individual congregational care, or 
at least have an assistant. He should be free to 
inspect and overlook the whole field, so that 
where counsel is needed, counsel can be had ; 
that when difficulties arise some one may have 
time and ability to adjust them ; that inexperienced 
young pastors may be admonished and guided ; 
and so that instead of helmless drifting and 
confusion, there may be prudent, wise, and orderly 
administration. 

While in theory, then, and in practice, the 
Lutheran Church must maintain pure doctrine as 
the essential characteristic of the Church, it is 
also a matter of the gravest practical moment, 
that there be an efficient Church Polity. That 
Polity is to be as variable as are the exigencies of 
the case. And that one — whether by a sytem of 
Synodical Superintendents or of Bishops — should 

*Church History, Vol. I, p. 193. 



7o 

be chosen, which is best adapted to the particular 
situation. It is admitted on all sides, that as our 
Church in America is growing so large and em- 
bracing such vast interests, the question of a 
government which will contribute to its wiser 
administration, order, unity, and efficiency, be- 
comes every day the more pressing a problem oj 
the hour. And this question should be met 
intelligently, patiently, and unselfishly, that under 
the guidance of Providence, our Church in this 
land may be so organized and ordered, as the 
most fully to develop its spiritual agency, as an 
efficient part of the universal Christian Church. 

But in its discussion every true Lutheran will 
bear in mind the noble words of Bishop Yon 
Scheele of the Swedish Lutheran Church, which 
sound the key-note to the Scriptural and Luth- 
eran theorv of Church eovernment viz.: "It does 
not matter so much whether we have Bishops or 
not, but that we have Christ with us and confess 
Him, as the great Head and Bishop of the 
Church." 



CHAPTER X. 



LUTHERAN WORSHIP. 



^PHE foundation of the ritual of the Lutheran 
1 Church was laid in Luther's work: "The 
Order of Service in the Church" (1523). It was 
his intention to retain all that was good in the 
service of the Catholic Church, while discarding all 
unevangelical doctrines and practices. The 
various states of Germany have their own Church 
orders, which differ, however, only in minor par- 
ticulars. Luther introduced the use of the ver- 
nacular tongue into the public services, restored 
preaching to its proper place, and insisted upon the 
participation of the congregation in the services, 
declaring " common prayer exceedingly useful and 
helpful." The popular use of hymns was introduced 
by Luther, who was himself an enthusiastic singer, 
and by his own hymns became the father of 



72 

German Church hymnology, which is richer than 
any other. Congregational singing continues to 
form one of the principle features in the public 
services."* 

The foregoing is a very fair summary by an 
impartial witness, the Presbyterian Dr. S chaff, of 
the chief outlines of Lutheran Worship. It 
specifies these cardinal features : 

i That Preaching forms the central element of 
the service. 

2 That " Common Prayer [Luther's own words] 
as exceedingly useful and helpful," is to have a 
leading place. That is, the minister is not to 
have the whole service to himself, but the people 
are to have their share in the worship. 

3 That congregational singing is to be a 
"principal feature." 

4 That the services of the Ancient Church — 
the usages of Christians of all lands and times — 
were to be "retained," only "excepting unevan- 
gelical" features. 

5 That there is a definite historical Lutheran 
service, which, while uniform in any particular 
country, "differs" in various states, "however 
only in minor particulars." The remark often 

*Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, Vol. II, p. 1372. 



73 

made that Lutherans in Europe have numerous 
varying orders of service is here seen to be 
essentially misleading. For, not only are these 
orders all framed after the same generic pattern, 
but only one uniform service is used in each 
different country or territory. Hence, Dr. 
Schaff's statement, as an unbiassed judge, is 
quite correct. 

As Luther reformed but did not destroy the 
old faith, so, also, he reformed and cast anew, but 
did not destroy the old service. Upon this 
venerable edifice of Christian worship, as the out- 
growth, under the Holy Spirit, of Christian 
experience, and as the visible expression of the 
communion of saints, Luther would have been 
the last to lay irreverent or destructive hands. Of 
its origin and antiquity, Dr. Wenner well and 
beautifully says : " It is fair to assume that during 
the first century the principal outlines of the 
Christian Service were established and generally 
observed," indicating "an original impress of 
Apostolical usage and authority. Its foundations 
were laid in the far off past. Its object is the 
glory of God and the salvation of men. Its walls 
have breasted the storms and tumults of passing 
ages. Its architectural lines have continually 
pointed upward to the unseen world. The history 



74 

of Christian Worship leads us on hallowed paths; 
to understand and behold its secrets we need 
anointed eyes. Many questions that agitate the 
Church at this time are of passing and relative 
importance. This affects its very life. It springs 
from the very heart of Christianity, and is inti- 
mately connected with the life of every believer."* 
As thus the Primitive and Mediaeval Church 
had been liturgical, and as Public and Common 
Worship, are impossible without common forms 
for the congregation, so also is the Lutheran 
Church liturgical. And that the Lutheran liturgy 
which Luther moulded retained the leading 
characteristics of the worship of all the saints back 
to Apostolic times, is no reproach to it, but one 
of its chief glories. Who does not feel his faith 
strengthened and his religious devotion stirred by 
the consciousness that the prayer or song he is 
uplifting has voiced the devotions of the saints 
up to the throne for a thousand years! What a 
sublime illustration is this of Christian Unity! 
What a sweet and comforting realization of the 
communion of the saints! What a foretaste in 
the worship of the earthly temple of that in the 
heavenly temple, when in answer to a voice 

♦Christian Worship. — Lutheran Quarterly, October, 1892, pp. 
452, 455- 



75 . 

that came out of the throne there was returned 
the common response, "as it were the voice of a 
great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, 
and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, 
Alleluia; for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth" 
(Rev. xix ; 6). There is no worship in the world 
to-day at once so ancient and so modern, so 
liturgical and yet so spontaneous, so reverent, 
and yet so stirring the deepest springs of living 
enthusiasm, as that ol the Lutheran Church. 
Writes President White of Cornell University of 
Lutheran Worship in Germany: "These hymns 
laden with the highest hopes and inspirations of 
past centuries, take hold upon the German heart 
to-day. In the Churches the service of praise 
comes from the hearts and voices of the whole 
congregation."* And writes another non-Luth- 
eran of Lutheran Worship in Berlin: "What 
pure, single worship is here! With all the liturgy 
and ceremony there is still a wonderful simplicity. 
There is a solemnity and beauty in its worship, an 
earnestness and reverence within its sacred 
temples, a richness, depth, satisfaction in its 
services — a reverence, in all, that fills the soul with 
a completeness of devotion. How one grows to 
love the Protestant Church of Germany." 

*Hand Book of Lutheranism, p. 15. 



95 I M 1 50 1 52 1 W 



76 

The liturgical service of the Lutheran Church 
is eminently Scriptural, largely using the identical 
Scripture words ; it places the preaching of the 
Word in the centre about which all revolves ; it 
is so simple that a child or stranger can easily 
use it ; and it is very brief, requiring only about 
one-fourth the time to the sermon occupied by 
the service of the Episcopal Church. Yet it is 
liturgically symmetrical and full. As a service for 
devotion, it is ordered in perfect adaptation to the 
nature of Christian Worship. It prepares the 
worshipper for the divine audience by the Con- 
fession; it begins the service proper in the Introit; 
it mounts to rapture at the beatific vision in the 
Gloria in Excelsis; it bows in prayer in the 
Collect ; it hears the voice of God in the Epistle 
and Gospel; it returns the answer of the congre- 
gation in the Creed ; it gives wing to Christian 
Song in the Hymns; it renders the sacrifice of 
praise in the General Prayer, and of gifts in the 
Offertory ; and then it departs with the trinal 
Benediction. The service is responsive ; is framed 
about the Christian year; is constantly varied, 
the Introits and Collects changing for every 
Sunday ; gives preaching the central place ; 
allows room for the exercise of liberty, as in the 
use or disuse of parts and in the choice of written or 



77 

extemporaneous prayer; and is so simple and 
direct that any stranger can at once use it. "All 
its various parts centre around Christ, presenting 
Him in all His offices, in both His states, in the 
fullness of His work, and in all His relations to 
the sinful and sorrowing, the penitent and be- 
lieving, the afflicted and tempted, the dying and 
the glorified. Its lessons, and responses, and collects, 
and chants are intended simply to carry the devo- 
tions of the worshippers to the Throne of Grace, as 
far as possible, in the very words of Holy Scripture* 
Wherever introduced it is affectionately cherished 
by the congregations, who could scarcely be per- 
suaded to become accustomed to the coldness, and 

*That able and moderate journal, the New York Observer (Pres- 
byterian), thus speaks of this feature: "To many devout persons 
this Lutheran Service-Book will be chiefly interesting and acceptable 
because of its Scriptural character, a large part of its phraseology 
being in the language of sacred writ, the Psalms and Lessons being 
given in the incomparable English of the Version which has been 
more widely read than any other words that ever were written. * * * 
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this service is that it is 
not commanded, but commended to the use of the Churches for 
which it was provided. So careful are the Lutherans of the liberty 
of the people in matters of worship, that they maintain the princi- 
ples embodied in the Augsburg Confession, namely, that unity of 
doctrine and the administration of the sacraments are sufficient for 
the true unity of the Church, that differences in rites and ceremonies 
are not injurious to this unity, that ordinances of men ought not 
to be forced on the congregations. At the same time it is believed 
that harmony and edification are secured by pure and holy worship 
that is common and universal." 



■W — I 58 1— "58 — I — CD — I — 52 — I — 54 — T 



78 

formality, and incoherency, affording little food for 
the heart, that so often characterizes a service 
without a fixed order/'* 

Ritualism — an extreme ceremonial, a meaning- 
less repitition of rites, an introduction of such 
Romish usages as were rejected at the Reforma- 
tion — is unknown in the Lutheran Church. Even 
in those countries where an Episcopal Constitution, 
and the greatest correspondence with Mediaeval 
usages prevails, as in Scandinavia, Lutheran 
Worship has always retained a pure and high 
spirituality. Thus writes a careful observer and 
traveler of large experience: "Here we find 
universally prevalent a very " High Church Luth- 
eranism" which many of us have been educated 
to regard as "Ritualism" — mere dead "Formal- 
ism." Be that as it may, I must confess that this 
very " High Church Lutheranism" with its high 
Ritual, throughout has produced the highest 
expression of applied Christianity among the 
Norwegians, the world has yet seen. There the 
system has had a most thorough trial for 350 
years, and the results, if they prove anything, 
prove that it most likely promotes the highest 
gospel graces in heart and life, for here we find 

*Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of the General Bodies of the 
Lutheran Church, p. 116. 



79 

the highest type of Christian nation in the world."* 
Such is the conclusive answer Lutherans can 
make if ever the groundless charge of "High 
Church" and " Ritualism," is made. " By their 
fruits shall ye know them" (Matt, vii; 16). 

Luther saw the value of a Common Liturgical 
Order of Worship. Accordingly, when he pub- 
lished his German Order of Service in 1526 he 
thus advised: "It would be beautiful and admirable, 
if in every territory, the order of service would be 
the same, and the surrounding towns and villages 
would follow the same." The Patriarch Muhlen- 
berg saw the same need and wrote in 1783 in the 
closing days of his life: "It would be a most 
desirable and advantageous thing if all the 
Evangelical Lutheran congregations in the North 
American States were united with one another, 
and if they all used the same order of service and 
the same hymn-book!' And sagacious observers 
see and feel that this is one of the greatest needs of 
American Lutheranism now. Thus Prof. M. 
Valentine, D.D. says: "A general uniformity is 
felt to be desirable, but not held to be necessary."f 
Rev. J. G. Butler, D.D. writes: "Greater uni- 

*M. W. Hamma. D.D. 

^Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of the General Bodies of 
the Evangelical Lutheran Church, p. 48. 



to 1 — m — 1 — sr 



8o 

formity in our Church services would conduce 
greatly to the outer and inner unity of the Church, 
in which there is now too much that is loose, and 
in many cases, even disorderly. This uniformity 
secured in our Churches, the Lutheran Church, 
which is one Church, would preserve and 
strengthen the bonds which, under God, I trust 
will ever make us an undivided and united family 
of the great household of faith." And that veteran 
of American Lutheranism, Rev. F. W. Conrad, 
D.D., Editor of the Lutheran Observer, gives this 
wise counsel: "This state of nonconformity was 
the legitimate outgrowth of the principle of free- 
dom in worship maintained by leather, which, 
notwithstanding his solemn warning against its 
perversion, and his emphatic testimony to the de- 
sireableness of a uniform church service in all the 
congregations of a country, was carried to an 
unwarranted extreme. The same abuse of liberty 
in worship, and disregard of the importance of uni- 
formity in church services in Germany, have pro- 
duced the same variety and indifference to uniform- 
ity in worship in the Lutheran Churches of 
America." And writes the Doctor: " A general 
desire is felt that a uniform Order of Worship 
may yet be adopted in all the Lutheran Churches 
of America."* 

♦Luther Memorial Tract, p. 6. — F. W. Conrad, D.D. 



To remedy these evils the General Synod South 
at Staunton, Va. 1876,* adopted this resolution: 
"Resolved, that with a view to promote uniformity 
in worship and strengthen the bonds of unity 
throughout all our churches, the Committee on 
the Revision of the Book of Worship be instructed 
to confer with the Lutheran General Synod of 
the United States, and with the Lutheran General 
Council in America, in regard to the feasibility of 
adopting but one book containing the same hymns 
and the same order of service and liturgic forms 
to be used in all the English-speaking Evangelical 
Lutheran Churches in the United States." To 
this proposition the General Synod responded 
with enthusiasm at its session in Springfield, 
Ohio, in 1883, where feeling that the movement 
was Providential, unanimously and with a rising 
vote, it resolved "that we hail as one of the most 
auspicious outlooks of our Church in America 
the prospect of securing a Common Service for all 
English-speaking Lutherans!' And the General 
Council having joined these two General Bodies 
in the movement on "the generic and well-defined 
basis of the common consent of the pure Lutheran 
Liturgies of the Sixteenth Century," there resulted 
what is now known as "The Common Service." 

*On motion of the author, then a pastor at Savannah, Ga. 



» I M I MJ — I — 50 — I — 52 — I — m 



82 

Of the intrinsic merit of this Service Dr. Conrad 
says: "In the number, variety, and devotional 
style of its parts, and in beauty and force of 
expression, the order of worship may justly be 
regarded as the highest product of the intelligence, 
piety, culture and taste, guided by the devotional 
spirit, of the Church of Christ; and is worthy of 
the respect, not only of every Lutheran, but of 
every Protestant, and deserves a sincere and fair 
trial by the pastors and congregations of the three 
bodies for whom it was prepared."* 

Of it, further, a Lutheran can say with pride 
that it is the order virtually in use by fifty 
millions of Christians in all quarters of the globe, 
and therefore of incalculably greater historic and 
devotional interest than any other book of wor- 
ship in the world. In harmony with Lutheran 
principles its use is not made "obligatory upon 
congregations," or imposed as a law to bind the 
conscience. It is simply "commended" by the 
General Bodies, "as serving to edification," and 
as tending to foster devotion, cement unity, and 
promote denominational efficiency.f 

^Lutheran Observer, Oct. 19 and 26, 1888. 

fAs an illustration of the benefits of its use, the Rev. E. T. 
Horn, D.D., President of the United Synod in the South, says of its 
introduction there: "It gives order to our worship, secures uni- 
formity among us, provides a system of devotion in harmony with 



83 

During the earlier history of America, the 
Puritanic ideas of worship generally prevalent, 
were anything but favorable to the popularity of 
the Lutheran service. But the progress of the 
country in culture, and in just conceptions of 
worship, and the marked tendency in all denomi- 
nations to liturgical services, are drawing special 
attention to the Lutheran Worship. And its 
scripturalness, devotional spirit, symmetry, mode- 
ration, and reproduction of the pure primitive 
Church Services, are securing it most favorable 
recognition. This tendency finds notable ex- 
pression in the great History of the Christian 
Church, now being issued by Dr. S chaff, where 
he thus contrasts the Lutheran with other modes 
of worship: "The Zwinglian and Calvinistic 
worship depends for its effect too much upon the 

our faith, maintains among us the fundamental doctrines of God's 
Word and an administration of the Sacraments according to the 
Gospel, and stores in the minds of our children the form of sound 
words ; and while we rejoice in our accord with the fathers of our 
own Church and with the Church of all ages, in the use of these 
venerable forms, the Southern Church has hoped to fulfill her own 
special vocation in uniting in this the Churches of the General 
Synod and those of the General Council with her own. This hope 
seems destined to fulfillment ; and already the English Churches of 
the Synod of Missouri and of the Joint Synod of Ohio are adopting 
this Common Service of the Lutheran Church." — Distinctive Doc- 
trines and Usages of the General Bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran 
Church, p. 190. 



■y.l.y. l .MIMI- BIU 



8 4 

intellectual and spiritual power of the minister, 
who can make it either very solemn and im- 
pressive, or very cold and barren."* " Luther [on 
the other hand,] who was a poet and a musician, 
left larger scope for the aesthetic and artistic 
element ; and his Church has developed a rich 
liturgical literature. "f "The Lutheran Church is 
conservative and liturgical. She retained from 
the traditional usage what was not inconsistent 
with evangelical doctrine, while the Reformed 
Churches of the Zwinglian type aimed at the 
greatest simplicity." J 

It is thus evident that the more Reformed 
scholars and worshipers compare the barren 
meagreness of their services with the Lutheran, 
the more will the contrast of the spiritual beauty 
and fullness of the latter impress them. It is 
pleasing to know that Lutheran Worship, after 
having; stood the test of three and a half centu- 
ries, is thus in full keeping with the trend of 
modern liturgical ideas. Thus is the good ever 
at once both old and new. 

It is a remark not infrequently made that the 
Lutheran Service is very like the Episcopalian. 

*Vol. VII, p. 61. 
flbid; 

tVol. IV ; 486. 



85 

Such a remark results from a want of correct 
historical information. That there is a general 
similarity in the worship of these two liturgical 
Churches is very true. But the similitude is the 
other way. That is, it is the Episcopal Service 
which is like the Lutheran. The original Luth- 
eran Service dates from 1523, whereas the Book 
of Common Prayer only dates from 1549. And 
just as the English Bible is traceable to German 
soil and Lutheran influences, and as the XXXIX 
Articles of the Church of England were derived 
from the fountain head of the Lutheran Augsburg 
Confession, so the ritual and worship of the 
Episcopal Church are mainly tributary -to, and 
modelled after the Lutheran liturgies. The prin- 
cipal one of these was the Cologne Liturgy, which 
the Archbishop of Cologne, who had become a 
convert to Lutheranism, had Bucer and Melanch- 
thon draw up for him in 1543. Dr. Jacobs in 
his "Lutheran Movement in England" shows 
with exhaustive scholarship how in the Church of 
England the order of Morning and Evening 
Service, the Litany, the Communion Service, the 
orders for Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, 
Burial, etc. follow more or less closely the 
Lutheran Orders, often taking leading forms from 
Luther's identical words. The correspondence of 



1 — 58 — 1 . « 1 — 60 I b ' l 



86 

the worship of these two great historic Churches 
is matter of congratulation to both. But, when it 
comes to the point as to which one the credit of 
originating these services is due, historic justice 
should always be done. The Church of England 
is the daughter of the Church of Luther. And 
the daughter has wisely decked herself very 
largely in the beautiful robes of her spiritual 
mother. 



CHAPTER XL 



RITES AND FESTIVALS IN THE LUTHERAN CHURCH. 

THE Lutheran made no pretext to be a new 
Church, as if Christ's Church had been 
totally destroyed, and no Christian Church was 
existing on the earth. But she claimed to be the 
old true historic Church purified, reformed, and 
renewed. No historic chain was therefore to be 
broken, no rite abolished, no usage abandoned, 
which was rightfully observed in the ancient Church. 
Thus says the Augsburg Confession : Art. XV : 
"Concerning ecclesiastical rites our Churches 
teach that those rites are to be observed, which 
may be observed without sin, and are profitable 
for tranquillity and good order in the Church" — 
Art. XXVI : " Among us, in large part, the ancient 
rites are diligently observed. For it is a calum- 
nious falsehood, that all the ceremonies, all the 



88 

things instituted of old are abolished in our 
Churches." Apology of Melanchthon, Chap. 
IV; "It is pleasing to us that, for the sake of 
unity and good order universal rites be 
observed." That is, usages and forms of worship 
observed of old and everywhere by christians, 
were hallowed by such use, and to be maintained 
as a bond of unity. The Church historian, 
Guericke, therefore says: "The Evangelical 
Lutheran Church retains every undoubtedly 
ancient festival. In so doing, however, the Luth- 
eran Church reduces them all to their proper 
significance. The ultra-reformers, on the other 
hand, by their abrogation of all such commemora- 
tions have cut away from beneath their feet the 
true foundations of history and antiquity."* 

The idea of Luther and the Lutheran Church 
in retaining usages and rites practiced by the 
universal Christian Church from the time of Christ 
and the Apostles was to perpetuate a bond of 
visible unity between all believers. If divisions 
and discords sadden and disturb us, how agree- 
ments and concords that have outlived all differ- 
ences bridge this chasm of estrangement, and 
attest that the disciples of Jesus of whatever land, 

*Christian Antiquities, p. 197. 



and time, and name, are still one in the bonds of 
a blessed unity! Another precious feature of the 
perpetuation of universal usages is the assurance 
and reverence that come from such ancient and 
common observance. While the " customs of 
society and civil government are ever subject to 
change and vacillation, as being but human, how 
fitting that that kingdom, which is of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, should be "the same yesterday, to-day, 
and forever." In this invariability of customs 
the believer and even the world find a powerful 
confirmation of the immutability of the truth and 
faith of which they are the visible expression. 
With the Lutheran, that the Romish Church uses 
a universal rite is no more objection to it, than 
the use of the Apostles' Creed by that Church, is 
an objection to that venerable symbol. And the 
non-Lutheran Churches, in disusing universal 
rites, have in deference alone to groundless 
prejudice, cast away some of the choicest treas- 
ures, and the most potent and beneficent 
influences of the Christian Church. 

In illustration of these principles, the Lutheran 
Church observed the Christian Year. While 
many Saints' and Martyrs' days and excesses 
were stripped from it, the Chief Festivals, those 
"wreaths about the pillars of the Christian Year" 



90 

were retained. This was in keeping with Luther's 
advice, viz. " Especially should all keep Christmas. 
Circumcision, Epiphany, the Easter Festival, 
Ascension, and Pentecost — unchristian legends 
and songs having been done away."* While thus 
the Lutheran Church rejected the Romish pseudo- 
festivals, and abolished the great mass of Saints' 
days, she by no means, however, set aside the 
memorial days of the Apostles, Martyrs, All 
Saints, etc. But she retained these as being "an 
example of the believers," in Christian heroism, 
and godly virtues and graces. Accordingly, 
Luther said that there could be no better spiritual 
discipline for Christian youth than to place in 
their hands brief lives of the apostles, martyrs, 
and saints, discarding any legendary and super- 
stitious features. Dr. Seiss fitly says of the 
Lectionary for these Minor Festivals which our 
Church has appointed, that "it is particularly 
valuable for a complete rounding out of the system 
that prevails in the arrangement of the Pericopes 
for the Christian Church Year. * * * These 
selections conduct us into quite a different field 
from that of the other festivals. They bring into 
greater prominence the element of biography and 
personal character and experience. They show 

*The Christian Year, Horn, p. 53. 



9i 

us more of applied Christianity."* And of the 
rare spiritual value of their treatment in the pulpit 
his late noble volume is a worthy illustration. 
The Christian Year revolves about Jesus 
Christ as its centre, and its purpose is to show 
forth the successive stages of His life, and to 
interpret these for the edification of the believer's 
spiritual life. "The Year of the Ancient Church 
had for its foundations the great facts of the life 
of our Lord. All stress is laid upon the Word; 
no sanctity belongs to the day. The Lutheran 
Church, therefore, restored the Church Year to 
its purity."f And Ahlfeld beautifully says: "As 
the earth moves around the - visible sun, so the 
Church moves around the sun of divine grace — 
so she travels through the sacred history of the 
Savior. Her spring is the lovely season of 
Christmas and Epiphany, when Christ is born. 
Her summer is the season of Lent and the 
passion time of Jesus Christ. And her harvest 
and autumn are the Whitsuntide days, when the 
Holy Spirit is poured out upon the disciples, and 
when, in the long, lovely Trinity Sundays, one 
kind after another of the gifts of the Triune God 
is borne into the granary of the heart." 

*Lectures on the Gospel and Epistles for the Minor Festivals, 
p. 4. 

fThe Christian Year, Horn, p, 53. 



92 

On Advent Sunday, therefore, the Lutheran 
Church begins the Christian Year, and calls upon 
all her members to make a holy beginning in 
piety and Christian activity. On Christmas Day, 
with joy and thanksgiving, all gather about the 
holy child Jesus in the sanctuary. On Palm 
Sunday, the catechumens are presented to the 
Lord. On Easter, the Churches resound with 
the mighty rapture of the resurrection. And so 
to the end. On all the Sundays the Lessons — 
the Epistle and Gospel for the day — are read ; 
those selections of Scripture which have the 
sanction of the usage of more than a thousand 
years. To the chief ancient festivals the Lutheran 
Church has added another, that of the Reforma- 
tion. This is observed on the 31st of October, 
the anniversary of the beginning of the blessed 
work of the Reformation by Luther nailing up 
the famous theses. 

This observance of the Christian Year by the 
Lutheran Church, exempted from all Romish and 
ritualistic obligatory fasts and practices, not only 
is entirely without objection, but is eminently 
conducive to the production of a sound, rotund, 
conservative, spiritual life. With regard to 
objections urged against its observance, the 
Lutheran Review makes this forcible reply : 



"What a wealth of holy memories and sacred 
associations cluster around the . festivals of the 
Church Year to those who are accustomed to 
observe them. How lost we would feel and how 
we should miss these festivals if they were sud- 
denly stricken from the calendar. And yet the 
non-liturgical churches ignore the Church Year 
altogether, because they are afraid it savors of 
popery, and because these festivals are not 
commanded to be observed by the Word of God. 
We can only pity their childish fears, while w r e 
must protest against their inconsistencies. They 
reject the Church Year, which is observed by the 
vast majority of Christendom, on the plea that 
the Bible does not enjoin it, while at the same 
time they institute a Week of Prayer in January 
of each year. But where is the warrant for such 
a Week of Prayer? The zeal of would-be re- 
formers very often gets the better of their 
discretion, as is abundantly evident in the Puri- 
tanic obliteration of all the Church festivals."* 
The following notable utterance of the extremely 
Broad Church and liberalistic Phillips Brooks, 
shows how utterly groundless and unreasonable 
is the prejudice entertained by some even among 
us, as if an observance of the Pericope of the 

♦New York : E. F. Eilert, Editor. 



94 

Gospel and Epistles was infected with ritualism. 
He says: "Look at the way the pulpit teaches. 
I venture to say that there is nothing so unreason- 
able in any other branch of teaching. You are a 
minister, and you are to instruct these people in 
the truths of God, to bring God's message to 
them. All the vast range of God's revelation 
and of man's duty is open to you. And how do 
you proceed? If you are like most ministers 
there is no order, no progress, no consecutive 
purpose, in your teaching. You never begin at 
the beginning and proceed step by step to the 
end of any course of orderly instruction. No 
other instruction ever was given so. No hearer 
has the least idea, as he goes to your Church, 
what you will preach to him about that day. It 
is hopeless to him to try to get ready for your 
teaching. It is this observance of the Church 
Year to which we owe so much as a help to the 
orderliness of our preaching. It still leaves 
largest liberty. It is no bondage within which 
any man is hampered. But the great procession 
of the year, sacred to our best human instincts, 
with the accumulated reverence of ages, leads 
those who walk in it, at least once every year, 
past all the great Christian facts, and however 
careless and selfish be the preacher, will not leave 



95 

it in his power to keep them from his people. 
The Church Year, too, preserves the personality 
of our religion. It is concrete and picturesque. 
The historical Jesus is forever there. It lays 
each life continually down beside the perfect life, 
that it may see at once its imperfection and its 
hope."* 

The beautiful rite of Confirmation is retained 
in the Lutheran Church. In the primitive Church 
this was originally administered by the officiating 
minister as the closing ceremonial of Baptism, in 
imitation of the apostolic practice, (Acts xix ; 6). 
In the course of time it came to be administered 
by the bishop alone as in the Romish and Episco- 
pal Churches. The Lutheran Church has 
returned to the primitive usage of its administra- 
tion by each pastor. " Its idea of confirmation 
is that of a renewal of the baptismal covenant, a 
conscious and responsible assumption by the 
individual himself, of the vow, which at his 
baptism, had been made for him by his sponsors. 
Its principal features are the catechetical exercises, 
the confession, and the vow, and its purpose a 
new-kindled devotion. "f Beyond doubt the 
majority of Protestant Churches have made a 

*Lectures on Preaching, pp. 90-91. 
■fSchaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 530. 



9 6 

great mistake and experience a yet greater loss 
in their rejection of this ancient, beautiful, and 
useful ceremony of Confirmation, as a means of 
introducing especially the baptized youth into the 
privileges and duties of public Church-member- 
ship. 

The rite of Confession, as . a fit preparatory 
discipline for the reception of the Lord's Supper, 
is universally practiced in Lutheran Churches. 
It is based on the words of Jesus to His disciples: 
" Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whosoever sins 
ye remit, they are remitted unto them ; and who- 
soever sins ye retain, they are retained," (John 
xx ; 22, 23); and upon the custom of the Ancient 
Church. Luther protested against the Romish 
perversion of the words of Christ, as shown in 
the practice of Auricular Confession. He taught 
that the " Power of the Keys," i. e., the absolution 
from sins was not absolute, but only declaratory, 
and was not limited to a priestly order, but a 
prerogative of the universal priesthood. He 
objected also to confession as obligatory, and to 
the necessity of an enumeration of all sins. With 
these limitations, however, Luther placed a very 
high estimate on the disciplinary value of Con- 
fession. He therefore makes use of this definition 
in the small catechism : "Confession consists of 



97 

two parts ; the one is, that we confess our sins ; the 
other, that we receive absolution or forgiveness 
through the pastor as of God himself, in no wise 
doubting, but firmly believing that our sins are thus 
forgiven before God in heaven." ''The views of 
Luther on Confession were expressed by Me- 
lanchthon in the Augsburg Confession, and 
adopted by the Lutheran Church, which at the 
same time so changed the character of Private 
Confession as to divest it of its unscriptural 
features. It was not imposed upon the consciences 
of the people as necessary to obtain justification, 
but rather extended to them as a privilege. An 
opportunity was thereby afforded to every mem- 
ber who had any trouble on his mind concerning 
his sins to reveal the matter to his pastor, in order 
to receive instruction and comfort. And the 
subject was thus removed from the sphere of 
ministerial authority to that of the pastoral care of 
souls, in verification of which Melanchthon explains 
Private Absolution as retained in the Churches, 
as nothing more than "the true voice of the 
Gospel" addressed to penitent souls by the 
ministers of Christ."* 



*Rev. F. W. Conrad, D.D., on Luther's Smaller Catechism, p. 
146. 



9 8 

The exercise of the rite of Confession in this 
pure Scriptural sense was distinctive of the 
Lutheran, as over against the other Protestant 
Churches at the time of the Reformation, and has 
continued so to the present time. " It was left to 
the great revival of apostolical Christianity in the 
1 6th century to clear away the rubbish that had 
accumulated around this institution. Zwingli 
utterly repudiated the traditional Power of the 
Keys, and confined it to the social sphere of the 
Church, the power of admitting and excluding 
members. Calvin held the same view except 
that he also included preaching. The Lutheran 
theologians, on the other hand, while retaining 
the old forms, £ave to them, as it were, a 
regeneration. To them, absolution was nothing 
less than the Word of God which must be be- 
lieved as truly, as if it were a voice from heaven. 
Ordinarily it was pronounced by the minister, not 
as a priestly mediator, but as a minister of the 
Church, deriving his authority from Christ indi- 
rectly through the Church."* Luther, with his 
intense religious and churchly feelings deemed 
confession invaluable to his spiritual experience. 
He says : " Not for the treasures of the whole 

*Rev. G. U. Wenner, D.D., on The Tower of the Keys. 



99 



world would I give up the privilege of private 
confession, for I know what strength and comfort 
I have derived from it. Nobody knows what it 
can do, until he has fought and contended with 
the devil. I would long since have been over- 
come and destroyed, if this confession had not 
sustained me." In the general practice of the 
Lutheran Church the Confession of Sins is not 
private, [which is reserved for exceptional cases] 
but public. It is regarded as a most salutary 
preparation for the reception of the Lord's 
Supper, which no one should fail to observe, unless 
prevented by necessity. Next to the Hoi)' Sacra- 
ment itself, the devout Lutheran prizes the 
opportunity to make public confession before the 
Church, and to receive that declaration of Abso- 
lution which the official representative of the 
Church is authorized to declare to the true 
penitent. 






CHAPTER XII, 



THE LUTHERAN AN ORTHODOX CHURCH. 

GHRISTIANITY in our time has come upon an 
extraordinary phenomenon — the glorification 
of Heresy. The primary characteristic of a chris- 
tian is Faith. Christians, therefore, have from the 
first worn the distinctive title : believers. Credo 
— I believe — begins the Apostles Creed. 
Christians by no means forego reason, but they 
do feel with Thomas a Kempis, that " Human 
reason is feeble and may be deceived : but true 
faith cannot be deceived. "* It was in this pro- 
found spiritual sense that Augustine wrote: 
" Faith makes christians: Reason makes heretics." 
If there was any deadly sin from which the saints 
of old shrank it was heresy — the denial, perver- 

*Book IV : Chap. XVIII. 



IOI 

sion, or commingling with error of the true 
christian faith, delivered by the Lord Jesus Christ 
and his Holy Apostles. Consequently St. Paul 
warns christians : "A man that is an heretic, after 
the first and second admonition reject" (Tit. 
iii ; 9.); meaning that this is an evil that dare not 
be temporized with, even as a viper dare not be 
taken to the bosom, or a traitor admitted within 
the camp. And St. Peter cautions us to be on 
vigilant watch against those "who privily bring 
in damnable heresies" (2 Pet. ii ; 1), lest thereby 
the christian citadel be undermined. 

As an illustration of the feeling of the primitive 
christians on this point, Eusebius, the early Church 
historian, records the tradition received from 
Polycarp. the martyr, that on one occasion the 
apostle John entered one of the ancient baths, 
but finding that the heresiarch Cerinthus was in 
one of the adjoining rooms, he hastily fled from 
the place, saying: "Let us flee, lest the bath fall 
in, as long as Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, 
is within.' '* The source of this strong aversion 
was that "the truth as it is in Jesus" is the most 
priceless treasure of Christianity ; and, that even 
a more deadly enemy of it than the avowed 

^Ecclesiastical History, chap. XXVIII. 



102 

infidel is he who, while falsely professing to be a 
christian, uses this profession as a vantage ground 
to "privily bring in damnable heresies." 

But what a contrast to this holy sensitiveness 
do we see at the present juncture. Heresies are 
multiplying on every hand. Heresies, too, not 
as mild and comparatively as non-essential as 
that of Cerinthus. But heresies of the destructive 
and deadly kind. It is claimed that a majority 
of the books of the Bible, instead of being written 
by their professed and inspired authors, are 
literary forgeries of quite other ages. The Bible 
is held no longer to be an infallible book, but full, 
of discrepancies and errors which were also in 
the original text. Christ himself is declared to 
have been fettered by many limitations, which 
led him into incorrect statements respecting the 
authorship of these books. Kuenen, Wellhausen, 
Driver, Briggs, etc., know a great deal more 
about them than He did, though He lived 1900 
years nearer their origin and had the not incon- 
siderable advantage of being Divine. In fact the 
whole origin of the Bible is treated as natural, 
like that of any other book. "We are at length 
beginning to realize the gravity of the present 
state of the Old Testament controversy. The 
Traditional views are being examined under the 



IQ3 

light of modern discoveries, and efforts are 
beginning to be made fairly to put in contrast 
that inspired and trustworthy record of the past, 
bearing the name of the Old Testament, and 
sealed with a belief of more than two thousand 
years in its genuineness and integrity, with that 
strange conglomerate of myth, legend, fabrica- 
tion, idealised narrative, falsified history, dram- 
atized fable, and after-event prophecy, to which 
modern critical analysis has sought to reduce 
that which the Church, day by day, calls the most 
Holy Word of Almighty God."* 

The same heretical treatment is applied to the 
Christian doctrines. The divinity of Jesus is 
sought to be abolished from the creed. The vi- 
carious atonement of our Lord, is reduced to a 
mere salutary example of suffering. Salvation 
by faith is denied. It does not matter what one 
believes. Jew, Infidel, Pagan, and Christian 
alike, will be asked how they have lived, not 
what they have believed. Hence the venerable 
Christian creeds are denounced as yokes of tyranny. 
The sacraments are held to be of inconsiderable 
moment. The resurrection is ridiculed as a 
scientific impossibility and absurdity. And so on 

*Christus Comprobator — Bishop Ellicott, p. 93. 



104 

through the list. Now, it is perfectly evident 
that these heresies invalidate the whole christian 
structure. They leave no authentic Bible ; no 
veritable Christ; no fatal sin; no true atone- 
ment; no real Church ; no historical Christianity; 
no visible Kingdom of God. Their triumph 
means the disappearance of Christianity in its 
visible, historic form from the earth. Now it is 
nothing new for Christianity to be assailed by 
heresies. Ever has the banner of truth had to 
battle its way against bitter foes. But what is 
new and unparallelled is that these heresies are 
sought to be legitimized. Their advocates are 
not to be censured or excommunicated, but to be 
extolled. The journal of a leading religious de- 
nomination thus writes: ''Orthodoxy is stagna- 
tion and spiritual death." "The heretics of 
to-day are the christian leaders of to-morrow." 
Those who have denied the divinity of Christ, as 
Martineau, "are the High Priests and Prophets 
of mankind," writes a Professor in regular standing 
in Union Theological Seminary, New York. 
How closely akin are these utterances to that of 
the infidel Ingersoll, who cries: "Orthodoxy is 
retrogression and tyranny — Heresy is the eternal 
dawn." In fact, in many religious quarters, there 
is no surer road to popularity than to pose as an 






I_H^M 



heretic. One has but bitterly to assail some 
great Christian doctrine, and he is heralded as a 
scholar, a champion of progress and freedom, a 
remonstrant against effete dogmas, and his fame 
travels beyond the seas. To such an extent has 
this gone that the late Spurgeon felt himself 
compelled to retire from fellowship with the 
Baptist union in England, and after the recent 
failure of the attempt to convict the most daring 
leader of the destructive critical school in 
America a noted infidel said: "Old John Knox 
and Calvin must have turned in their graves, 
when it was decided by the Presbyterian Church 
that this man was right.* Why, do you know 
that in a little while the Protestant Churches will 
be waiting to take me in!" And while this ex- 
aggeration was in keeping with the orator's 
ribald style, yet his and his hearers elation were 
significant f the radical trend of much of modern 
Protestantism. 

But amid this wild onset and uproar of heresy, 
the Lutheran Church stands firm. She abides 
immovably grounded on the truth. Under her 
feet is the Rock of Ages, and the waves of hell 

*To the credit of this great Church, this action was reversed 
by the General Assembly at Washington. 



io6 

shall not prevail against her. She is not com- 
pelled to any creed revision. She does not 
canonize heretics. She is not embarrassed by 
heresy trials. She does not abridge a hair's 
breadth her acceptance of the Bible. She does 
not stumble at holy mysteries, but holds, as even 
the great critic Lessing admits : " For what sort 
of a Revelation would that be which reveals 
nothing?" She compromises not a single doc- 
trine. She stands where Christ stood ; where 
the apostles stood ; where the primitive christian 
stood ; where the true confessors all through the 
Mediaeval darkness stood ; where Luther and the 
Reformers stood, when they emerged into the 
light ; and where the saints of all ages have stood ; 
and where by God's grace she will stand to the end 
of time. She unreservedly accepts and holds to 
the three Ecumenical (universal) Creeds — the 
Apostles, the Nicene, and the Athanasian. And 
she holds to the unaltered Augsburg Confession. 
These she does not hold as the Bible, but as 
correct witnesses to the faith of the Bible. Thus 
she voices her belief with that of the current 
Christendom of all the centuries. She lifts up her 
testimony in sweet and unbroken accord with the 
universal "communion of saints." She is not an 
heretical, but an orthodox Church. She does not 



107 

glory in error, but in truth. She does not lift her 
sword to assail Christianity, but to defend it. 
These eloquent words, lately spoken, correctly 
define the Lutheran position : " Cling to the old 
faith. There is much falling away on this point. 
People are too fondly persuading themselves that 
the Creeds which cheered and sustained so many 
generations must now be expurgated or damned. 
The world is thronged with zealots, busy building 
straw bridges between the orthodoxy of ages and 
the unbeliefs and shallow self-assertions of this 
supercillious and self-lauding generation. The 
greatest need of our times is the re-Christening 
of Christendom. A flabby goodishness, which 
makes nothing of doctrine, Church and Sacra- 
ments, is not Christianity, and only deceives those 
who trust to it. What men need is positive truth 
—a teaching that has back-bone in it, and stands 
out solid and erect above the muddy sentimental- 
ities of the day — a teaching which anxious and 
perishing souls can lay hold on and feel that they 
have something substantial on which to rest. 
There is such a thing as clear and positive truth. 
God's word presents it. Christ embodied it. 
Prophets and Apostles preached it. It has been 
echoed down through the centuries. Our sainted 
Confessors revoiced it in our immortal Augustana. 



io8 

And on it hangs the destiny of mankind, for 
time and for eternity."* 

While thus refusing to place natural reason 
above Faith, the Lutheran Church takes care not 
to divorce Faith from Good Works. She " discoun- 
tenances all dead orthodoxy, and next to purity of 
doctrine lays all stress upon showing the faith in 
a Christian life. She has from the beginning 
tried to enforce strict Church discipline in her con- 
gregations, and requires of those who seek to be 
admitted to membership evidence of a Christian 
life. In all relations of Christian and Church 
life she urges the necessity of showing the true 
faith in good works. "f As the truth of God is 
the seed of spiritual life, so she holds that the 
purer the orthodoxy, the better and richer the 
harvest of practical godliness. 

This is the unique attitude of the Lutheran 
Church, that she stands to-day the one solidly 
unswerving witness of God on earth to the un- 
impaired "faith which was once delivered unto 
the saints" (Jude iii). Rationalism, the guise 
under which this heretical inundation is now 

*Dr. Seiss in address to Graduating Class of Philadelphia Theo- 
logical Seminary. 

f Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of the Lutheran Church, p. 
67. 



ioq 

threatening Christendom, has ever been alien to 
the spirit of the Lutheran Church. Bahrdt, the 
father of the modern school of rationalists, dis- 
cerningly remarked: "That in the doctrine of 
the Lord's Supper I was more Reformed than 
Lutheran, will be supposed as a matter of course."* 
And though Germany, because of its brilliant 
mental culture, is the nursery of Rationalism, yet 
it is not found in the Lutheran Church. Its home 
is in the universities, and in the schools of 
Reformed theology. And what is often over- 
looked is, that similarly the most powerful and 
numerous defences of evangelical Christianity 
come from Germany — from its great Evangelical 
Lutheran scholars. 

Prof. Christlieb some time since wrote the 
Homiletic Monthly : "This sketch shows that the 
overwhelming majority of the German ministers 
of to-day are positively Evangelical ; and at the 
same time that the overwhelming majority of 
them are more or less positively Lutheran." The 
widow of the late evangelical scholar, Dr. Howard 
Crosby, has just been visiting Germany, and this 
is her testimony from a non- Lutheran standpoint: 
"We have been most agreeably surprised by the 

♦German Protestantism, Kahnis, p. 136. 



no 

spiritual preaching we have heard everywhere in 
Germany ; not a word of poor, finite Rationalism, 
as we had feared, but simple faith in original 
form, with a rich armory of Bible texts, making- 
one feel that the only real strength comes from 
Scripture knowledge brought to remembrance by 
the Holy Spirit." :i: So writes also an observing 
Lutheran layman, "J. A. B.," in a late number 
of "The Lutheran World:" "I am in Prussia 
and in the capital of the German Empire, 
and, after spending six months in the Land of 
Luther's Church, I say that the members of the 
Church which bears his name in America, can 
look across the ocean for an example of Church 
love and fidelity. Lutherans of the United States 
do not be deceived by what you hear of the 
tendency to "Briggsism" among the Germans. 
The clergymen, as a class, are holy, earnest men 
of God, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, 
and working for the salvation of souls. As for 
the people, the plain people, with the exception 
of a small number of the various "free thinkers," 
they know of no disputes as to the Confession 
nor of any dogma of the Church. Every person, 
of the age of fourteen and over, is the owner of 

*Ntnu York Observer, September 18, 1892. 



Ill 

a hymn-book which contains the Augsburg Con- 
fession. It and the Bible settle the whole matter." 
The same is notably true of Lutheran pulpits 
in the United States. However uncertain one 
may feel as to whether orthodoxy will confirm 
his faith, or dangerous heresies offend his ear, on 
entering other Protestant Churches, we do not 
believe there is a Lutheran pulpit in all this land 
from which one will not hear the simple, pure, old 
gospel. Accordingly, President Patton of Prince- 
ton, recently remarked to the author that one of 
the most auspicious signs for Christendom was 
the unswerving fidelity of Lutheran pastors 
throughout the entire world to unimpaired 
Christian truth. 

The Lutheran is an orthodox Church. This 
is her distinctive, her unique, her unrivalled glory. 
She is "the Church of the pure doctrine."* With 
her, orders, polity, methods, forms, are as nothing, 
the faith is all in all. Like the Church in Phila- 
delphia spoken of in the Apocalypse, amid all 
the alluring degeneracies of these modern times, 
she "has kept My word, and has not denied My 
name." And therefore does "He who walketh 
in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks," 

*Church History, Kurtz, Vol. Ill, p. 39. 



112 

say to her: "I also will keep thee from the hour 
of temptation, which shall come upon all the 
world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. 
Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take 
thy crown" (Rev. iii ; 8, 9.). 






CHAPTER XIII. 



LUTHERANS AND THE CHURCH. 

LUTHERANS believe not only in Christianity 
but in the Church. They hold that the 
spiritual life exists in and through a visible form, 
"Christ's body, which is the Church" (Col. i; 24). 
Piety has an historical as well as a spiritual side. 
A Lutheran, therefore, does not regard as 
either Scriptural or safe that Christianity which is 
indifferent to and independent of churchliness. 

The Lutheran conception of the Church, first, 
is that it is divine. It is "the household of God 
— built upon the foundation of the apostles and 
prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief 
corner-stone" (Ephes. ii ; 20). It is the congre- 
gation of the saints — all those who are joined by 
faith to the Lord Jesus Christ. Its purpose is the 
preaching of the Word and the celebration of 



ii4 

the Sacraments, for the conversion of sinners, 
and the edification of the faithful. Jesus Christ is 
the " Head of the Church," and its members are 
one in Him, and by this means are one with one 
another. "This communion we then call holy, 
because in it the Holy Ghost is operating* to 
sanctify it; catholic, because however widely the 
members of the Church are scattered, yet at all 
times and in all places the same faith is confessed; 
apostolic, because its faith resting upon that pro- 
claimed by the apostles, has never, in the course 
of time been changed. "* 

The Church, as thus divine, is entirely ttnique, 
and is not to be compared with any merely human 
society or institution. But it is separated from 
these by an impassable chasm of superiority. 
Its obligations, its claims, its powers, proceed 
from God, and are endued with the might of the 
Holy Ghost. The Church is the " Body of 
Christ," the organ by which He continuously 
lives and mightily works on the earth. This 
clothes it with supernatural spiritual forces, such 
as pertain to no merely natural or moral associa- 
tion whatever. 

♦Lutheran Doctrinal Theology — Schmid, p. 599. 



U5 

The Church is visible and invisible. By the 
visible Church we mean the Church in that 
broader sense in which it comprises all those 
who, by observance of the outward conditions, 
are regular members of the Church. But by the 
invisible Church we mean the Church in that 
narrower sense in which it comprises alone the 
truly regenerate, those whose inner union with 
Christ complies with their outward profession of 
Him. But the Lutheran Church repudiates such 
a perversion of the idea of the invisible Church, 
as would make it embrace those who reject 
Christ's visible terms of communion. "Nor is 
the Church of the elect said to be invisible because 
the pious and elect have no intercourse whatever 
with the visible ministry of the Word and Sacra- 
ments, and with the outward practice of divine 
worship." :: ' : The invisible Church is not larger 
and more extensive, than the visible, but just the 
reverse. Nor is it apart from the visible, but in 
and a part of it. "The relation between them is 
this, that the Church in the narrower sense exists 
in the midst of the Church in the wider sense. "f 
"The Church invisible becomes visible through 

*Gerhard XI ; 83. 

fLutheran Doctrinal Theology — Schmid, p. 600. 



n6 

the Word and Sacraments."* One may be in the 
visible Church, and yet not be in the invisible. 
But the divine order is that one cannot be in the 
invisible Church without being in the visible. 
Here the rule is, subject to such exceptions as 
God in His wisdom and mercy may allow, that 
laid down by St. Augustine: " He who has not 
the Church for his Mother cannot have God for 
his Father." 

Lutherans further hold the Church to be one. 
"There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism" 
(Ephes. iv; 5). "And there shall be one fold, 
and one Shepherd" (John x; 16). Diverse 
Churches with differing faiths and antagonistic 
confessions — the one a protest against the other, 
the one unchurching the other — are not the idea 
of the gospel. Such separated and rival organi- 
zations do not hold the relation to each other of 
branches of the Vine, limbs of the Body, or 
natural members of the Christian Family. Hence 
the Lutheran Church aspires after a true Christian 
unity, an oneness in "the truth as it is in Jesus." 
And assured that she holds that faith, and 
administers the sacraments in their purity, while 
not denying that others are more or less true 

*Holman Lecture on the Church, P. Bergstresser, D.D. 



ii7 

Churches, or contain regenerated souls, yet she 
aims to bring back to the pure confession of the 
truth, all such as have more or less erred there- 
from, and thus to realize on earth the "One holy 
Catholic and Apostolic Church," confessed in the 
Nicene Creed. 

The Church, further, is the divine instrumentality 
for salvation. To it are committed the Word and 
Sacraments, the Means of Grace. As these are 
the divinely ordained agencies for causing justi- 
fying faith, men must come to these ordinances 
for salvation: "For the obtaining of faith, the 
ministry of teaching the Gospel, and administering 
the Sacraments was instituted. For by the Word 
and Sacraments, as by instruments, the Holy 
Spirit is given." Augsburg Confession, Art. V. 
For the administration of these Means of Grace, 
there must be a ministry. Hence results the 
Ministerial Office, and no one has the right to 
officiate in these holy things, unless he receives 
a regular call from the Church. The witness and 
seal of this call is the rite of ordination. 

As to the Church have been committed these 
divine powers, agencies, and instrumentalities of 
grace and salvation, to her belongs the regenera- 
tion of society. Her spiritual forces alone are 
competent to the overthrow of moral evil. She 



n8 

alone can successfully cope with impiety, immo- 
rality, and vice. Where all human societies are 
impotent, and where all reforms undertaken on a 
merely moral basis will fail, she can perform 
moral wonders in the name of Christ " working 
with her, and confirming the Word by signs 
following" (Mark xvi ; 20). All great movements 
then of a reformatory character, every attempt at 
the moral regeneration of society, and all uplifting 
power for the rescue and redemption of mankind, 
must issue from the Church, and be conducted 
under her guidance. Here she is at war with 
many of the skeptical theories promulgated by 
social reformers of our time. 

To the Church moreover, through the mini- 
sterial office, pertains the Power of the Keys. This 
the Augsburg Confession, Article XXVIII, thus 
defines: "The Power of the Keys, or the power 
of the bishops, by the rule of the Gospel, is a 
power, or commandment from God, of preaching 
the Gospel, of remitting or retaining sins, and of 
administering the Sacraments. For Christ doth 
send His Apostles with the charge: "As the 
Father hath sent me, even so send I you. Re- 
ceive ye the Holy Ghost ; whosesoever sins ye 
remit, they are remitted unto them ; and whoseso- 
ever sins ye retain, they are retained" (John xx; 



ii9 

21-23). Again, [the Power of the Keys is] the 
jurisdiction to judge in regard to doctrine, and to 
exclude from the communion of the Church. And 
herein of necessity the Churches ought by Divine 
right to render obedience unto them [the bishops 
or ministers]." That is, to the Church belongs 
the preservation of the pure gospel. To her, for 
safe keeping and transmission, are "committed 
the oracles of God" (Rom. iii ; 2). She is "the 
pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. iii; 15). 
In this capacity she has framed the canon of 
Holy Scripture. She has faithfully kept and 
transmitted the record of divine revelation. And 
she is the witness-bearing Church, in that by her 
creeds and confessions she bears unanimous and 
continuous testimony to the true teaching of this 
Scripture. The Church thus has a history and 
is known by historical marks. And the difference 
between her history and secular histories, is that 
her history directly bears the formative hand of 
the Holy Ghost, and therefore most markedly 
reflects the divine guidance. " Howbeit when 
He, the Spirit of Truth is come, He will guide 
you into all truth" (John xvi ; 13). As we study 
the course of the Christian Church through the 
centuries, we observe the leadings and trace the 
footprints of the Son of God. 



120 

The Church, thus, is an orderly kingdom with 
a constituted government, so that in it "all things 
may be done decently and in order" (i Cor. xiv; 
40). The Church is not destitute of authority. 
It has the power of self-preservation. There is 
a legitimate ecclesiastical government. Within 
due limits there must within the Church, and 
with regard to its spiritual officers be r 1 e and 
obedience, as saith the Scripture, "Obey them 
that have the rule over you, and submit your- 
selves ; for they watch for your souls, as they that 
must give account" (Heb. xiii; 17). To this Power 
of the Keys pertains the exercise of discipline, 
the excommunication of heretics, that the faith 
may be kept intact, and the correction or excom- 
munication of the immoral, that the fellowship 
may be kept pure. And to this authority, legiti- 
mately exercised, every one must bow, even as 
it is written: "Tell it unto the Church; but if he 
neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee 
as a heathen man and a publican" (Matt, xviii ; 

17). 

The congregation, however, is the ultimate 
source of power. As Lutherans hold the universal 
priesthood of all believers, the ministerial office, 
and hence "the Power of the Keys," is rooted in 
the congregation. For the sake of order it simply 



121 

delegates its rights to some fellow member that 
he may officiate for all. The Scriptural or New 
Testament Church was organized by the setting 
apart of Presbyters or Bishops — synonyms for 
the one office of Minister — and Deacons ; and 
this system is that of the Lutheran Church. For 
the sake of order, these Ministers, with lay rep- 
resentatives from the congregations, constitute 
themselves into synods. As these synods repre- 
sent the embodied wisdom and piety of the 
Church, it is the moral duty of the congregations 
to render obedience to them. The individual 
congregation is under the government of the 
Church Council, consisting of the Pastor and 
Deacons, or Elders, as they are often called. At 
the head of the congregation stands the Minister, 
to preach the Gospel, administer the Sacraments, 
conduct the rites of Confession and Confirmation, 
execute discipline, and in general to exercise the 
Power of the Keys. "The pastor, by virtue of 
his office, is at the head, not only of the Sunday 
School, but of the Church Council and every 
organization connected with the Church. The 
superintendent of the Sunday School, and presi- 
dents and officers of the various organizations, 
are in no respect equal, much less superior, in 
authority to the pastor. Because of pastoral 



122 

duties, or various other considerations, he may 
absent himself from any meeting, or even when 
he is present, he may leave the meeting entirely 
in the hands of chosen officers ; but the fact 
remains that the pastor is not only the spiritual 
leader, but the ordained head of all the affairs of 
the congregation. We think this position is un- 
questionably the correct Scriptural and therefore 
Lutheran, view of the relation between the pastor 
and all associations in the congregation."* 

In Europe much injury has resulted from the 
union of Church and State in Lutheran countries. 
This arises from a perversion of the Lutheran 
theory. The Church and State, as both ordained 
of God, and necessary to secular and spiritual 
order, have a vital connection. With the Family, 
they constitute those three estates or pillars upon 
which is supported the whole fabric of society. 
The Church, therefore, should instil loyalty to 
the State. And the State should render spiritual 
deference and allegiance to the Church. But 
when the Church wields force to execute her 
authority, she transcends her spiritual realm and 
incroaches upon the prerogatives of the State. 
And when the State appoints ministers, maintains 

* Lutheran Observer, Editorial, March 17th, 1893. 



123 

professors in theological chairs, and decides 
questions of doctrine, she incroaches upon the 
Church's legitimate spiritual supremacy, assumes 
the Power of the Keys, foments confusion, pro- 
motes heresy, and causes general disorder. 

Such is the Lutheran conception of the Church. 
It differs radically from the Romish idea in this 
that it denies that the Church depends upon a 
certain external constitution or order, but upon 
the pure confession of the truth. It denies like- 
wise the Papal Primacy, that the Pope is the 
successor of the Apostle Peter and the infallible 
Head of the Church. It denies, too, an absolute, 
instead of a declarative, power upon the part of 
the priests, as a sacerdotal order, to forgive sins. 
And it denies also the infallibility of a General 
Council of the Church, for even this has been 
known to err. There always remains, as of the 
Very kernel and essence of Protestantism, the 
exercise of Private Judgment, the right of appeal 
to the Holy Scripture, as the only supreme, in- 
errant, infallible, and final tribunal. 

This Lutheran view of the Church, likewise, 
differs from that of the Protestant Episcopal, in 
that it denies the existence of three orders in the 
Church, viz. Deacons, Priests, and Bishops — of 
which three orders there is no account in the 



124 

Scriptures, while there is positive testimony that 
there was no such distinction in the apostolic age, 
or first century of the Church. And it likewise 
repudiates the claim of the apostolic succession 
of the Episcopate, and the attempt to invalidate 
the legitimate ministry of those who have not 
been Episcopally ordained, and to invalidate the 
Church membership of such as have not been 
Episcopally confirmed. This is making the Church 
to depend upon orders instead of faith, which is 
contrary to the Scriptures. 

The Lutheran view of the Church none the 
less differs from the Calvinistic and Zwinglian 
Churches, who, on the other hand, often take too 
low and latitudinarian views of it. These de- 
preciate the legitimate authority of the Church, 
virtually nullifying the Power of the Keys, and 
by dissociating saving grace from the sacraments, 
and by a false conception of the invisible Church 
as apart from the visible, deprive the Church of 
its chief significance as God's ordained kingdom 
of salvation. 

The current views in America, respecting the 
Church, are to a large degree infected with 
Rationalism. The prevalent tendency often is to 
regard the Church as little better than u a purely 
human organization, very much on a level with 



125 

other societies."* That Christ can be found with- 
out the Church, that saving grace may be given 
through other channels than the Word and Sacra- 
ments, that "the Faith once delivered to the 
saints," is liable to change with each decade like 
the latest assumption of science, or like the plat- 
form of a political convention, are the sentiments 
most in vogue with the Low or Broad Churchism 
of the time. What the Christianity of our day 
then needs is the element of Churchliness. A 
due regard for the uniqueness of "the Church of 
God;" a fitting reverence for its sacraments and 
historic usages ; a becoming regard to judicious 
ecclesiastical authority and order; and a lively 
appreciation of the necessity and beauty of 
Churchly graces and virtues. 

And herein we see again the great value of the 
Lutheran view and teaching in regard to the 
Church. Nothing is more required by the present 
situation, to correct errors, to restrain false ten- 
dencies, and to promote the welfare of Christendom, 
than insistence upon the Lutheran theory of the 
Church. So wise, so Scriptural, so Catholic, so 
intensely Protestant, so guarded, and so important 
to meet present exigences, is her testimony on 

*The Church, Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 474. 



126 

this point, that every Lutheran should feel it his 
mission not alone to intelligently understand it, 
but also to illustrate it in act and in life. 






CHAPTER XIV. 



LUTHERAN PIETY. 



THE doctrinal character of a Church has a 
direct bearing upon the religious life. Thus 
the Lutheran or Calvinistic systems produce 
markedly diverse types of Christians. The deeper, 
fuller, more childlike faith of the Lutheran results 
in a deeper, richer spiritual life. His intenser 
hold upon the very heart of the gospel, causes a 
still inner spirit of unusual beauty, depth, and 
power. Consequently, sensationalism, turbulent 
revivalism, and all forms of religious demonstra- 
tiveness, are altogether foreign to him. The 
meditative, devotional, quietistic temper is the 
characteristic Lutheran one. Still, but deep ; quiet, 
but mighty ; not in name but in power. The 
Lutheran spirit is simple, modest, unobtrusive. 
Writes Dr. Schaff: "The Lutheran piety has its 



28 



peculiar charm, the charm of Mary, who sat at 
Jesus' feet and heard His word. It has a rich 
inward life. The Lutheran Church numbers her 
mystics who bathed in the ocean of infinite love. 
She has sung the most fervent hymns to the 
Savior, and holds sweet childlike intercourse with 
the heavenly Father." This mystical spirit is 
reflected in her doctrinal literature and prayer 
books, which are the richest in the world — as 
Arndt's True Christianity, Gerhard's " Medita- 
tiones Sacrae," "Gotthold's Emblems," etc. 

Another characteristic of Lutheran Piety is its 
cheerful and hearty joy 'ousness. It is not austere 
or Puritanical. It is not narrow or one-sided. It 
has nothing in it of the severity of asceticism. It 
is not the enforced perfunctory service of the 
slave, but the free, willing obedience of the son. 
It enters with a frank and hearty spirit into all 
the joyousness spread about in the kingdom of 
nature. Love being its centre and keystone, its 
genializing influences soften and irradiate the 
whole Lutheran system. Believing that the good 
things of life were meant by the Creator to be 
enjoyed, it does not hold to a theory of abstinence, 
but ''temperate in all things" is its motto. "It 
excels in honesty, kindness, affection, cheerfulness, 



129 

and that ' Gemuthlichkeit! for which other nations 
have not even a name."* 

This happy temper is imbibed from its founder. 
With all Luther's poignant conviction of sin, his 
life of theological battle, and his superhuman 
labors, he yet was intensely human, genial, and 
sympathetic. " With childlike joy he recognized 
God's gifts in nature, in garden and field, plants 
and cattle. He was enraptured with the beauties 
of Spring, the bloom of the flowers, and the song 
of the birds. "f He loved home, children, friends. 
In the evening, after his hard studies, he would 
gather about the social circle with his friends, and 
dissolve his soul to the melodies of his lute. Thus 
he touched whole spheres of human nature to 
which Calvin was a stranger. 

And this freedom and sunshine of Luther's 
nature characterize the piety of Lutheran, as 
contrasted with Reformed peoples. " The religious 
life in the Reformed Churches is characterized 
generally by harsh legalism, rigorous renunciation 

*Dr. John Hall of New York, writes from Germany to the 
Mail and Expi'ess • il There is one feature of German life, as it comes 
under the notice of a tourist, which deserves commendation — 
namely, the general sobriety of the people. An intoxicated person 
is not often seen."' 

•jTvoestlin's Life of Luther, p. 597. 



13° 

of the world, coupled with unbending decision 
and energy of will. It is the spirit of Calvin 
which impresses on it this character, and deter- 
mines its doctrine."* The contrasted free joy- 
ousness, larger Christian liberty, innocent 
amusements, non-Puritanical conception of the 
Sabbath, etc. in Lutheran lands, are often 
misinterpreted and grossly misrepresented by 
those reared under Calvinistic influences. 

A third feature of Lutheran Piety is \Xs practi- 
cal character. This is shown in the religiousness 
and Churchliness of popular life, the propagation 
of Missions, the erection of Orphans' Homes, 
Deaconesses' Houses, and general beneficent and 
pious activity. Nowhere in the world is the 
practical result of Christianity in individual up- 
rightness and household piety so marked as among 
the Scandinavians, who are almost wholly Luth- 
erans. Says the noted traveler, Du Chaillu : 
"Passing along their highways, after the lamps 
are lit, the farmers may be seen with the big 
Bible on the table, and reading it to the family. 
Mothers sit by the cradle of their babes and lull 
them to sleep with hymns and psalms. They say, 
"We want our children from their birth to hear 

*Kurtz's Church History, Vol. Ill, p. 59. 



i3i 

us sing praises to God ; we want them to fear and 
love God when they grow up, for He is good to 
us all." "There are tens of thousands of laymen, 
members of the State Church, earnest Christians, 
who are seeking to promote the cause of Christ 
in a manner and with a devotion which we of 
another temperament and country can scarcely 
comprehend. Sunday is observed as a Christian 
holy-day in all places. The word of God is 
preached in every parish. Wherever you go you 
will find people going to Church, and some walk 
a great distance, and do not stay at home on 
account of disagreeable weather. The stores and 
public places are closed, and the Sunday laws are 
kept strictly during the time of divine services."* 
Speaking of the sterling honesty of the people 
and of their trust in each other, so that when they 
leave their houses, they hang up the key on the 
outside, Congressman S. S. Cox, says: "We 
left our umbrella in the cars (reaching 
Copenhagen) ; and as an illustration of the regard 
to the mcum et tuum which obtains among these 
people, we afterwards found it at our hotel in 
Norway, forwarded as if it were actual property, 
and at a cost too small to record." The Gustavus 

*Hand Book of Lutheranism, p. 125. 



132 

Adolphus Society, organized to assist Protestant 
congregations in Roman Catholic countries, last 
year gave help to 1,633 such congregations. 
Since its organization it has aided 3,843 con- 
gregations. No wonder that these pious 
Scandinavian Lutherans, out of their comparative 
poverty, giving so generously to carry the gospel 
to the heathen, resent as an abuse of Christian 
courtesy and charity, the action of some Ameri- 
can sects in treating them as heathen, and appro- 
priating more money for their conversion than 
they do for the dark continent of Africa. 

Of Germany, in the Seventeenth Century, when 
the Lutheran type of piety was very marked and 
prevalent, Kahnis writes : " In the houses Bible 
and hymn book were the first and the last, the 
most faithful advisers in all the events of life. In 
the higher, as well as in the elementary schools, 
the confession of the fathers was considered as 
the chief knowledge ; to be regular in attending 
the house of the Lord, and in coming to the table 
of the Lord, formed part of the family honor. 
All the ordinances of rank, of law, of the State, 
were connected with religion. " :!: To-day/' Societies 
for the better observance of the Lord's day ; for 

*IIistory of German Protestantism, p. 251. 



133 

the promotion of temperance, the improvement 
of prison discipline and the care of dismissed con- 
victs ; the establishment of institutions for the 
laboring classes, colliers, sailors, orphans and the 
poor; and of asylums, hospitals, and deaconess 
homes ; and all the efforts and means for the moral 
and religious reformatory movements, which are 
comprehended under the name of Inner Mission, 
are multiplying in every quarter."* 

American Christians with Puritanic and anti- 
Lutheran prejudices who visit Europe often bring 
back unfavorable reports as to the state of religion 
in Lutheran lands and capitals. A few facts are 
quite sufficient to refute these prejudiced mis- 
representations. Thus, it is charged that Berlin 
is an utterly irreligious city and that Christianity 
and the Church are there destitute of life and 
activity. Yet there are at present 26 Churches 
in process of erection in Berlin, and some of these 
so large that most of our edifices in comparison 
are but chapels. Where can such Church Exten- 
sion activity be surpassed? And in each of these 
great Churches there are held numerous successive 
services on the Lord's day, and frequently during 
the week. The lack of Church accomodations is 

*Hand Book of Lutheranism, p. 14. 



134 

often spoken of as a matter of reproach to these 
Lutheran lands. Yet a late number of the Inde- 
pendent shows that the German Empire has a 
Protestant (Lutheran) population of 30,964,274, 
and 24,996 Protestant houses of worship, i. e., one 
Church for every 1,240 people, old and young. 
This is amply sufficient. As a matter of fact, 
taking the adults alone, the ratio is, in Prussia, 
one Church to 435, in Denmark, one to 400, and 
in Wurtemberg, one to 337. No better and more 
sufficient Church accomodations than these can 
be found elsewhere. This Churchly piety extends 
from the hut to the throne. Not only are the 
Lutheran Emperor and Empress regular wor- 
shipers, but they show the liveliest interest in 
Christian and Churchly enterprises, and sustain 
them by princely gifts of private generosity. "The 
Lutheran Church in Prussia embraces 6,900 pas- 
toral charges, 200 of which were organized within 
the last four years. The annual number of con- 
firmations is 318,000. There are 2,200 young 
men studying for the ministry in this Church. 
The gifts made in 1891 for the charitable objects 
of the Church amounted to $1,050,000. "Out of- 
a Protestant population of 18,000,000, statistics 
show that 5,980,140 had communed within the 
last year — a better showing than this country can 



*35 

make. Of the Protestant population of the United 
States only one-fifth are communicants, and in 
Prussia we have one-third of the population not 
merely entitled to communion, but actually par- 
ticipating in the Lord's Supper within a year."* 
For the whole empire the average- of those 
confirmed who communed was 48^ per cent., 9 
per cent being the lowest, and 81 per cent, 
being the highest. The notable feature, however, 
was that the lowest percentage was at Hamburg, 
where liberalism has made the greatest inroads 
and where confessional Lutheranism is weakest. 
And the very highest averages were maintained 
in the strictly Lutheran parts of the empire, and 
among the separatistic Lutheran congregations, 
as the one at Zwickau. 

The same is true of Lutherans in the United 
States, that they constitute the most reliably in- 
dustrious and religious elements of the population, 
and that their quiet and unobtrusive, but thorough 
piety, is every day being more felt and acknow- 
ledged. "The real judgment of the vigor of our 
spiritual life is based upon a comparison with the 
spiritual life of present religious bodies. As com- 
pared with them, the result is on the whole favor- 

*Rev. G. F. Behringer in Lutheran Observer. 



136 

able. Our Church is respected and esteemed by 
the best ministers and best members of other 
Churches. It has not only now place and recog- 
nition, but maintains them with increasing power."* 

The Lutheran Church is the parent of modern 
evangelical missions. A Lutheran King of Den- 
mark sent the first Protestant Missionaries to 
India, where the name of the Lutheran Schwarz 
yet lives among the Christian natives in undying 
fragrance. And "the Lutheran Church was 
carrying forward on a vast scale a successful 
mission in India one hundred years before any of 
the English Churches had a single missionary 
station in heathen lands. "f The Herrmansburg 
Missionary Society in Germany, founded by the 
Lutheran, Harms, has been so wonderfully blessed, 
and the means of sending out so many mission- 
aries to heathen lands, as to win the envious 
title : "The Wonder of the Mission World." And 
the first religious book translated for the evangeli- 
zation of our American Indians was Luther's 
Catechism, by Campanius, a Swedish Lutheran 
pastor. "The Lutheran Church has 40 chartered 
missionary societies at work among the heathen. 

*Rev. C. S. Albert, D.D., in Lutheran Observer, 
-{-Lutherans in America — Wolf, p. 494. 



137 

These societies have 185 stations in Asia, 505 in 
Africa, and 12 in Australia. On these 700 stations, 
occupied as centres of mission labor, there are 
1,000 missionaries, 100 native preachers, and 4,000 
other native helpers. On the 700 mission stations, 
there are 210,000 members, 1,000 schools, and 
60,000 pupils. The annual income of the societies 
is $1,200,000. Its fields of Labor are: Japan, 
Southern China, Sumatra, Borneo, Farther India, 
.Central and Southern India, Persia, Palestine, in 
Asia; Bogss-land, Galla-land, German East Africa, 
Madagascar, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free 
State, Cape Colony, Namaqualand, the Congo, 
the Cameroons and Togeland, Slave Coast, Gold 
Coast, Liberia, Senegambia, in Africa; Queensland, 
New Zealand and New Guinea, in Australia. 
Greenland and Lapland are not counted in, 
because they are almost Christianized — thro' her 
efforts."* 

The first and greatest Orphan Asylum, was 
founded in a Lutheran Country, Halle, Germany, 
and by a Lutheran, Francke. At his death it 
provided for 2,000 orphans, and it has been the 
blessed seed of similar institutions now scattered 
all over the world. 

*Mission Tract, Dr. Wackernagel, Muhlenberg College. 



'38 

The institution of Protestant Deaconesses, re- 
sembling the Catholic sisterhoods of charity, was 
founded by a Lutheran pastor, Fliedner, at Kaiser- 
werth, Germany. From this beginning, in 1836. 
the order has spread through Germany, Switzer- 
land, France, Scandinavia, Russia, Austria, 
England, and the United States, until there are 
now 65 Deaconess Houses, with 8,678 sisters and 
2,774 labor stations. " Germany," says the Inde- 
pendent \ "leads all Christian countries in this 
work." The most splendid of these in the United 
States is the Mary J. Drexel Home and Mother 
House of Deaconesses at Philadelphia, founded 
by the gift of $500,000, and supported by its 
Lutheran founder, John D. Lankenau, Esq., while 
he lives. In all, there are sixty-six Orphans' 
Homes, Deaconess Houses, etc. in the United 
States. 

The Lutheran piety, then, is the brightest gem 
in her coronet of Christian graces. It is joyous, 
as well as stable ; practical, while Churchly and 
conservative ; and knows how, from the still 
closet of a holy mysticism, to go forth in the world 
and serve God with works of power. The purest 
orthodoxy should not be dead, but the tree that 
bears the best and most plentiful deeds of practical 
piety. Lutherans best serve their Church, and 



139 

honor its faith, when "having the form of godli- 
ness they do not deny the power thereof," but 
when it can be said of them as of Luther that 
"the confessor of the righteousness of faith had 
what he confessed and was what he taught." 



CHAPTER XV. 

CHRISTIAN NURTURE, OR CHILDREN IN THE 
LUTHERAN CHURCH. 

THE Lutheran Doctrine of Baptism involves 
the idea of Christian Nurture. It is that 
Baptism is to be applied to infants, and that 
Baptism is the beginning of the spiritual life. This 
holy beginning, or quickening, is thenceforward to 
be fostered and developed by the use of the means 
of grace. As intelligence dawns, the baptismal 
covenant is to be unfolded to the child, viz. that 
by it he is admitted into the kingdom of God and 
called to salvation and eternal life. Then by the 
Word, and later on by the Sacrament, the grace 
of his Baptism is to be nourished and strengthened 
on to full and ever-growing Christian stature. 
That is, the child's spiritual life is to repeat that 
of the holy and model child Jesus, viz. " And the 



141 

Child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with 
wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him" 
(Luke ii ; 40). 

The Scriptures consistently thus represent the 
spiritual life as a growth, a development, an 
orderly progress, after the semblance of the 
natural life. "So is the kingdom of God, as if a 
man should cast seed in the ground — and the seed 
should spring and grow up — first the blade, then 
the ear, after that the full corn in the ear" (Mark 
iv; 26-28). Children, thus, being in the kingdom 
of God by baptism, and having the new spiritual 
life therein begun in them, are already in a state 
of grace. And all that they have to do is to 
"keep" and nurture that "good thing which was 
committed unto them by the Holy Ghost, which 
dwelleth in them" (2. Tim. i; 14). The theory of 
the Churches which deny baptismal grace and the 
beginning of the spiritual life therein, is that 
children are in a condition of spiritual death, out 
of which they must be aroused by some great and 
sudden spiritual excitement, conflict, and experi- 
ence. 

The decisive objection to this view is that it 
leaves children and youth during all their early 
years in the attitude of unregenerated souls, who, 
should they die, would die unconverted and be 



142 

lost. And then it contradicts the scriptural order 
of the life of grace which is that of a gradual 
process of growth, instead of that of a sudden 
and violent change. The Lutheran idea, then, of 
Christian Nurture rests upon the idea that child- 
ren in baptism are "planted in Jesus Christ our 
Lord and Savior," and that all through their early 
years this formative power of grace is developing 
them into spiritual manhood. They do not look 
forward to conversion, but God has already 
accepted them, and they enjoy the divine favor. 
But here then comes the responsibility of 
parents and sponsors. If the new life is to be 
gradually developed during youth, and not to be 
suddenly acquired at a later period, then all the 
means of grace must be most carefully applied 
during this critical season. Hence the duty of 
Christian Nurture. For this, accordingly, the 
Lutheran Church makes careful provision. In 
the formula of baptism this obligation is thus 
urged : " I now admonish you, who have done so 
charitable a work to this child in its Baptism, 
that ye diligently and faithfully teach it, or have 
it taught, that it may learn to know the will of 
God, to obtain grace, and find -help to lead a 
Christian life, till God shall perfect that which He 
hath now begun in it, and bring it to life ever- 



H3 

lasting." In order to fulfill this obligation there 
results the duty of religious instruction at home, 
in school, and in Church. 

That this might be efficiently done Luther pre- 
pared the Catechism, wherein children should be 
taught in a plain and Scriptural manner the plan 
of salvation as exemplified in the Ten Command- 
ments or Law, in the Creed or Gospel, in the 
Lord's Prayer, and in the Holy Sacraments as 
the Means of Grace. Of the great importance 
of this religious agency, Luther wrote: "The 
Catechism is the first and most important instruct- 
tion for children. Catechisation ought to be 
diligently practiced by every parent at home, and 
by every pastor in the Church. No one can be- 
come master of the whole catechism, aud hence 
all the members of the Church should continue 
to study it. Let no one be ashamed of it, but 
adhere to it steadfastly, for it must remain and 
attain the ascendency in the Church, though earth 
and hell rao-e against it." The catechisation of 
the young, then, their careful and systematic in- 
struction in the elementary truths of Christianity 
and the order of salvation, is diligently practiced 
everywhere by the Lutheran Church. She believes 
that childhood and youth are the golden season 
to " Remember thy Creator," and the opportune 



144 

age to find Him who has promised: "Those that 
seek Me early shall find me " (Prov. viii ; 1 7). And 
then, when the young intelligently comprehend 
their baptismal covenant, and are ready to ratify 
it for themselves, and are spiritually strong 
enough to run for themselves the Christian race, 
they come out and make their good confession at 
the altar by the holy rite of Confirmation. "The 
General Synod * * * lays the utmost stress upon 
the duty of bringing up the young in ' the nurture 
and admonition of the Lord,' especially those to 
whom God, through holy baptism, has given the 
'adoption of children,' that they may become, 
and truly be, in heart and life, all that is meant in 
their divinely-given Church-membership. As 
'the force, value, and blessing of the baptismal 
covenant and grace are to extend through their 
whole subsequent lives,' the method of their 
proper care and spiritual development is regarded 
as distinctively educational, under the regenerat- 
ing and sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost 
through the truth as it is in Jesus Christ. * * * 
Catechisation, therefore, is not looked upon as a 
mere routine formality, or a process of simply 
intellectual indoctrination, that shall, of course, 
terminate in confirmation, irrespective of genuine 
faith, spiritual interest, or a purpose of true 



H5 

Christian obedience on the part of the catechu- 
mens."* 

The Lutheran Church has thus ever had a 
warm place in her fold for the tender lambs, and 
her whole history exemplifies those sweet words 
of Jesus : " Suffer the little children to come unto 
Me, and forbid them not ; for of such is the 
kingdom of God" (Mark x; 14). "The Lutheran 
Church devotes her best strength to the religious 
instruction and training of the young. She has 
in this land nearly 5,000 pastors annually cate- 
chising them. She has nearly 500,000 scholars 
in Sunday Schools. "f But her experience has 
been that valuable as is the Sunday School as a 
spiritual agency, yet the instruction given there 
but one hour in the week, and the catechetical 
teaching of the pastor, with the very little that 
too often alas! is imparted at home, is not 
sufficient to counteract the abounding worldly 
temptations and influences at work to weaken 
religious impressions. This is shown by the 
fact that so many of those confirmed after a short 
time relapse, and fall away from their good con- 
fession. Hence, in foreien lands, Lutheran child- 

*" Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of Lutheran Bodies." — 
Prof. M. Valentine, D.D., LL.D., pp. 51 and 52. 
fThe Lutheran Church — Schmauk, p. 9. 



146 

ren receive regular religious instruction as a part 
of their daily school curriculum for years both 
before and after confirmation. 

And in America, where such religious instruc- 
tion is not given in the Public Schools, to meet 
this want, there has arisen the Parochial School. 
This is a school in connection with a congregation, 
supported and managed by it. Of these Lutheran 
Parochial Schools there are about 3,000 in the 
United States, with about 300,000 scholars. In 
addition to secular instruction, the scholars are 
taught daily the Catechism, Bible History, the 
Life of Christ, Church History, the Reformation, 
the Augsburg Confession, etc. " In most of the 
non-religious subjects of instruction, the English 
[these are chiefly German schools.] tongue is used 
in the class-room." Writes one of their advo- 
cates : " We cannot be satisfied with having our 
children instructed an hour a week in matters that 
pertain to the eternal salvation of their immortal 
souls. We are convinced, and this conviction of 
ours is based upon experience, that if our children 
are to receive a thorough knowledge and lasting 
impression of the Bible, its divine truths and 
commandments, they are in need of daily religious 
instruction. The law ot God will have to be 
called to their minds, explained to them, and 



brought home to their hearts day after daw Even 
the secular sciences taught in our schools are 
pervaded by a Christian spirit. That is what we, 
under present circumstances, deem the best, it 
not the only correct method of bringing up our 
children in the nurture and admonition of the 
Lord ; and that is the reason why we Lutherans 
make it a practice to establish, build, and maintain 
parochial schools." ' When we see this motive 
and hear these plausible arguments, and remem- 
ber the pious sacrifice prompting the support of 
these parochial schools, while the national public 
schools must be supported in addition, we cannot 
but admire the spirit shown. 

The truth is the lack of religion in America as 
a part of the daily tutelage of the young is rapidly 
becoming one of the greatest problems of the 
hour. To it. more than to all other causes must 
be traced the growing irreli^ion of our vouth, and 
the indifference of the masses to the Church. These 
evils are largely owing to the want of a specific 
system of Christian Nurture, such as prevails in 
the Lutheran Church. And what our Church in 
this country needs is to adhere to these judicious 
principles, and not alone to hold them in theory., 

*Hand Book of Lutheranism. p. 420. 



1 48 

but to reduce them to practice. The grave re- 
sponsibility resting upon Lutheran pastors and 
parents, is to see to it that the children of the 
Church are not spiritually neglected, but that they 
grow up under such constant religious influences 
as shall hold them for Christ, and develop in them 
a strong and abiding Christian man and woman- 
hood. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE young people of the Lutheran Church 
considered as a distinctive class, have only 
come into prominence within the past few years, 
since our Church in common with all other 
denominations has realized the fact that the 
enlistment of her young people is necessary for 
the future welfare of the Church. 

Nothing has expressed this idea more forcibly 
than a paragraph appearing in one of the pam- 
phets issued by the Lutheran Young People's 
Association, of New York, which reads as follows: 

"All careful observers must admit that the 
efforts put forth by the Churches of all denomina- 

*This chapter is contributed, at the author's request, by E. F. 
Eilert, President of The Luther League of New York, and Editor 
of "Luther League Review" 



ISO 

tions to enlist the young people of their respective 
communities in the cause of Christ, are of the 
most vital importance to the successful evangeli- 
zation of the world, because the young men and 
young women of every nation have in their 
keeping the destiny of that nation, and the result 
will be either for or against the Kingdom of 
Christ, just in the proportion in which the Churches 
have recognized and utilized these mighty forces 
for the work of that kingdom, or else have been 
recreant in their trust, and have allowed the 
spiritual life to become dormant. 'Whatsoever a 
man sows, that shall he reap,' is no truer of indi- 
viduals than of Churches. That these facts are 
accepted as of supreme importance is attested by 
the establishment of National Associations for 
young people by many denominations. The 
Methodists have their Ep worth League, the 
Episcopalians the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, 
the Baptists their Baptist Union, and the Roman 
Catholics a very strong National organization, 
while the Society of Christian Endeavor, and 
Young Men's .Christian Associations, although 
undenominational in character, are wielding an 
influence that has been felt the world over. The 
Lutheran Church, however, has exceptional 
opportunities for reaching and keeping her young 



i5i 

people loyal to the Kingdom of the Saviour. Her 
Sunday School system, supplemented by a six 
months' course of catechetical instruction, and 
culminating in confirmation, gives her, when faith- 
fully carried out, an immense advantage over other 
denominations. Unfortunately, she has never 
made the fullest use of her opportunities, owing 
partly to mistaken zeal and conflicting languages, 
but mostly to neglect and indifference." 

Appreciating these opportunities, while deplor- 
ing the losses heretofore sustained, the young 
Lutherans of New York City about five years 
ago laid the first stone in the construction of a 
distinctive Lutheran Young People's Union, which 
should unite in a common bond of fellowship and 
mutual esteem, the young people of all the various 
divisions of our Church. 

The success of the Central Association thus 
formed was soon manifest, and after a few years 
trial in their own locality, the work was extended 
and plans made for the establishment of similar 
Central Associations throughout the country. 

In the plea issued for this work the following 
appeared : 

'• One of the greatest evils the Lutheran Church 
has to contend with is the proselyting of its young 
people by other denominations. It has been said 



152 

that the best material for Church workers is to be 
found among- the young Lutherans, and conse- 
quently they are much sought after. As the 
Lutheran Church has offered little inducement 
and encouragement _ for the usefulness of the 
younger element, it is not surprising that so many 
are taken away from her year after year, and be- 
come active in Churches of other denominations 
and among societies connected therewith. The 
plan of forming Central Associations of the Young 
People's Societies, existing in certain localities, 
and urging these Central bodies to see to it that 
a Young People's Society is to be found in every 
Lutheran Congregation in that locality, or district 
is one of the remedies that has been offered to 
overcome this great evil." 

The plan has met with favor and already a 
number of Central Associations have been estab- 
lished in many States, more particularly in New 
York State, where the work has been given 
special attention, resulting in the establishment of 
a New York State Association, called the Luther 
League of New York. 

While the movement has been centered largely 
in the East, it is gaining ground all over the 
country, and the organization of other State Asso- 



i53 

ciations and the formation of a National Union is 
only a question of a short time. 

By these means it is intended to have our 
Lutheran young people organized as thoroughly 
as any of the other denominations and unitedly 
work for the upbuilding of the Church and the 
advancement of Christ's Kingdom. 

Certainly these efforts should meet with the 
hearty approval of all our pastors and congrega- 
tions, and the time be looked forward to with lively 
anticipation when our young people will be 
organized into one grand National body. 

In the Lutheran Churches, unlike those of other 
denominations in this respect, we find various 
forms of associations, each congregation having 
such organization as it deems most suitable for 
the particular field in which it is located. The 
Christian Endeavor Society may be found in a 
number of congregations, more particularly among 
Churches of the General Synod. The Luther 
Alliance is a form of organization first inaugurated 
in one of the Synods of Pennsylvania. It uses a 
liturgical form of worship and adopts a particular 
constitution. The Alliance form has met with 
favor in many quarters. 

The form of association which is most common 
among Lutheran Churches is the Young People's 



J 54 

Society. It is conducted as other Church organi- 
zations, and is usually led by the pastor of the 
congregation. 

These organizations are adapted to the indi- 
vidual requirements of the congregation with 
which they are connected, their sphere, in some 
instances, being larger than in others, but as a 
usual thing having the care of the young people 
as their particular mission. 

Among the German Lutheran Churches, the 
Young Men's Association predominates, but 
usually Young Ladies' Societies are also connected 
with these congregations. Their work is, as a 
rule, similar to that of Young People's Societies. 

In the western part of New York State more 
especially than elsewhere, the beneficiary plan is 
used by a number of Young Men's Associations. 
These benevolent associations particularly aim to 
keep within the folds of the Church the young 
men who would otherwise join beneficiary orders 
or institutions. 

An examination of these beneficiary organiza- 
tions reveals the fact that two-thirds are German 
in language and membership, and consequently 
draw their members largely from our German 
Churches. 

Among the Central Associations of Lutheran 






155 

Young People already organized all the forms of 
organization alluded to will be found. It is not 
intended to recommend any of the particular types 
of associations, as each pastor and congregation 
is better able to judge the requirements of their 
particular Church and adopt the best form that is 
to be had. 

All associations of young Lutherans, no matter 
by what name the association is known, as 
long as they are connected with an Evangelical 
Lutheran Church, are entitled to membership in a 
Central Association. 

The Young People's movement which is so 
rapidly developing at present in the Lutheran 
Church is sni generis. Unlike many other de- 
nominations our young people make no claim to 
any "new" or improved method of spreading the 
Gospel, or of building up the Church, but rely 
exclusively upon the preached Word and the 
faithful use of the Sacraments for the propagation 
of the faith. Occupying a unique position, mid- 
way between pietistic separatism on the one hand, 
and the torpid inertia resultant from formalism on 
the other, this movement will be watched with 
interest by the whole Church, and the reflex 
influence of "youthful enthusiasm" cannot fail to 
stimulate the zeal of the older people. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



THE LUTHERAN CHURCH AND CULTURE. 

GERMANY represents the highest standpoint 
of intellectual culture attained in the history 
of the human race. "The Germans," says Emer- 
son, "are the modern Greeks, the intellectual 
masters of the world." "As Israel was elected to 
prepare the true religion for the world, Greece to 
develop the principles of science and art, Rome 
to actualize the idea of law and civil government 
— so in our times the chief significance of Ger- 
many lies in science and literature."* As Germany 
originated the Reformation, and thereby revolu- 
tionized the modern history of man, so has she 
been the centre of the greatest thought move- 
ments of the age. Her thinkers are in the fore- 
front in every problem of mind, and her scholars 

♦Germany and its Universities — Schaff, p. 8. 



»5* 

take the lead in every department of investigation 
and knowledge. In theology, in philosophy, and 
in science, the Germans are the leaders. "The 
German mind has been so productive in almost 
all branches of literary effort, that the annual 
issues of the German Press have numbered many 
thousands. * * * In philosophy the first name in 
the order of merit is that of Immanuel Kant. A 
powerful impulse was given to the study of history 
by Niebuhr. German researches have been 
carried into every region of the past. A host of 
German scholars have engaged in the investiga- 
tion of the origin and interpretation of the Bible. 
In Biblical criticism, Ewald, Tischendorf, Meyer, 
Weiss, are theological scholars familiar to Biblical 
students in all countries. German travelers have 
explored many countries of the globe. Schlie- 
mann has uncovered the ruins of Troy. In math- 
ematics and the natural sciences, in philology and 
criticism, in philosophy, in law and the political 
sciences, and in the different branches of theology, 
the world acknowledges its debt to the patient, 
methodical investigations, and the exhaustive dis- 
cussions of German students during the present 
century."* 

♦Universal History, Prof. Fisher, Yale College, p. 629. 



i5» 

Says Joseph Cook: "Germany is the most 
learned nation on the globe. The leading books 
in every scholar's library are written by Ger- 
mans." In 1892 America published 4,559 books, 
France 4,000, England 5,735, while Germany 
published 2 1,279, more than all the others together, 
and of a more scholarly order. Germany is the 
modern Athens — the literary centre toward 
which the students of all countries flock to com- 
plete a cultured education. The universities of 
Germany are the best equipped, attended by the 
largest number of students, and the most re- 
nowned in the world. In the year 1892, 30,000 
students attended the German universities, as 
against but 5,500 students at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, England. The Independent says: "The 
German universities are the most cosmopolitan 
institutions of learning in the world. They draw 
students literally from every cultured land and 
climate. Of the 29,518 students matriculated at 
these high schools during the present term no 
fewer than 1,948 are foreigners." "The universi- 
ties are the pride and glory of Germany. They 
are the centres of the highest intellectual and 
literary life of the nation, and the laboratories of 
new systems of thought and theories of action. 
They reflect a picture of the whole world of nature 



159 

and of mind under its ideal form."* Germany has 
the lowest ratio of illiterates in the world. In the 
Lutheran kingdom of Wurtemberg in every 10,000 
persons, there are only 2 who cannot read and 
write, while in the United States there are 1,700 
in every 10,000, or a ratio 850 times' as great.f 

And as Germany is the origin and chief centre 
of the Lutheran Church, it is inevitable that this 
same literary pre-eminence should characterize 
this communion. As a rule, the great universities 
are either exclusively Lutheran, or Lutheran 
professors have a controlling influence. The 
greatest theologians and biblical scholars have 
been those of the Lutheran Church. "German 
theological science comes forth from the Lutheran 
Church. The theology of the Lutheran Church 
supported by German diligence, thoroughness, 
and profundity, stage by stage, amid manifold 
struggles and revolutions, arose to an amazing 
elevation, astounding and incomprehensible to the 
Swiss, the French, and the English. "J 

"The Lutheran Church," says the Reformed 
Lange, "is the Church of theologians." "Her 

*Germany and its Universities — Schaff, p. 27. 
fUnited States Census on Illiteracy for 1880. 
JGoebel, pp. 263, 267, quoted in Krauth's Conservative Re- 
formation. 



i6o 

universities," writes Dr. Seiss, "have been the 
glory of Germany for the last three hundred 
years ; and her critics and religious teachers have 
been the leading instructors of Christendom from 
the days of Luther until now. Take from the 
religious literature of the nations all that has been, 
directly or indirectly, derived from Lutheran 
divines, and the ecclesiastical heavens would be 
bereft of most of its stars. Strike out the long 
list of Lutheran names and writings, in whatever 
department, which each of these past three centu- 
ries has furnished, and a void would be made for 
which all the ages could produce no adequate 
compensation."* "The first," says Dr. Wolf, "to 
liberate the human mind from mediaeval darkness 
and error, the Lutheran Church has always fos- 
tered thorough intellectual culture. Her scholars 
have within the present century restored the 
glories of the best age of Christian learning. Her 
wonderful literature, her great universities, her 
systems of popular education are felt by the 
world, "f 

Prof. Painter, of Roanake College, in his work 
" Luther on Education," shows that Luther, by 

♦Ecclesia Lutherana, p. 127. 
•f-Lutherans in America, p. 476. 



i6i 

his efforts to adapt instruction to children, his 
reorganization of schools, introducing graded 
instruction, improved courses of study, etc., laid 
the foundation of the modern educational system, 
which begins with the common school and ends 
with the university. ''The German common 
schools, dating from Luther, may claim to be the 
oldest in Europe or America."* Thus the Luth- 
eran Church, through her many-sided and far- 
seeing founder, and through her literary outfit in 
Germany has really given the- world the system 
of public schools, as well as the great university. 
"Perhaps in our practical Church work we do not 
sufficiently appreciate the fact that the Evangelical 
Lutheran Church, in her origin, history and char- 
acter, is Germanic, just as the Episcopal and 
Methodist Churches are English, and the Presby- 
terian is Scotch. As the doctrinal system of a 
Church penetrates a nation, so the national and 
ethnological characteristics of a nation impress 
themselves upon the Church. So, through centu- 
ries, Lutheranism, more than anything else, has 
made the Germans and Scandinavians what they 
are, and it is natural that the human elements of 
Lutheranism should be Germanic. It is not an 

*Dr. J. M. Gregory, Address to National Educational Associa- 
tion of the U. S., endorsed and circulated as an official paper by our 
Government. 



l62 

accident that the Germanic populations should feel 
most at home in the Lutheran Church, and that 
the Lutheran Church has her greatest success 
among these people."* 

The same literary activity characterizes the 
Lutheran Church in America. In the face of the 
greatest disadvantages, its scholarly ideal has 
moved it to the establishment of manifold colleges, 
theological seminaries, and religious periodicals, 
and to the formation of a distinctive Lutheran 
literature ever becoming more worthy of its 
historic character. 

This high degree of literary culture in the 
Lutheran Church naturally influences her methods. 
Large intelligence leads to moderation and en- 
lightened judgment. The emotional and sensa- 
tional religious methods, begotten of ignorance 
and illiteracy, are foreign to her. The culture of her 
ministry and of her people lifts them quite above 
these weak and ephemeral means. Accordingly, 
in her preaching, in her liturgical worship, in her 
methods of evangelization, everything "is done 
decently and in order." There may be Churches 
that have more money, but not that have better 
judgment and taste than the Lutheran. There 
may be Churches that draw more largely the 

*Rev. J. N. Lenker, in the Lutheran World. 



1 63 

untutored and novelty loving throng who wander 
like ecclesiastical tramps from one sensational 
glare to another, but no one, we believe, has so 
solid, so regular, so quiet, orderly, and sensible a 
membership. The Lutheran Church, accordingly, 
flourishes best in the most highly cultivated 
communities, and naturally attracts the thoughtful 
and cultured classes. 

Lutherans sometimes seem ignorant of this 
high character and standing of their own Church, 
and even seem to think slightingly of it as com- 
pared with others. But the truly enlightened and 
cultured of other Churches put a very different 
estimate on the Lutheran Church. They look up 
to it with the greatest respect, and to them one 
can bring no higher claim for regard than to say: 
" I am a Lutheran." 

To belong to a Church, the theological pre- 
ceptress of the world, the nursery of the foremost 
intellectual culture of the age, and that has among 
its members more crowned heads, more erudite 
scholars, and more cultivated peoples than any 
other, certainly has nothing in it to lower a 
Lutheran's proper self-esteem. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE LUTHERAN CHURCH AND SACRED ART. * 

NO factor, in every age, has had a more potent 
influence upon the emotions of men than 
Art — the representation by material objects and 
emblems of the true and beautiful. In a large 
sense, Nature herself is supreme Art, for all the 
lovely and varied forms of Nature are types, 
symbols, and signs, of the invisible world of 
thought. Inevitable is it, therefore, that Art 
should have a place in connection with Religion, 
and be taken into its employ as its handmaiden 
and servant. The truest, highest Art is that 
which leads the imagination toward the invisible 
by means of the visible — that which makes Nature 
a stepping stone to the Creator. Hence, the 
prominent place which Art has occupied in all the 
natural religions, those "growing wild." "It is 



i65 

an immutable truth that Art and Religion are hv 
separably united. Through music, poetry, paint- 
ing, sculpture and architecture, the spiritual can 
appeal directly to the human soul with a force 
that is irresistible. The Cathedrals and Churches 
of Europe, solemn and majestic, full of dim light 
and strange stillness, with their splendid ritual, have 
done much toward the spread and preservation 
of Christianity. Art is the ready servant and ally 
of the Church, and never have her proffered services, 
in the shape of ritual and adornment, been accepted 
without vast benefits, as, on the other hand, never 
have they been rejected without corresponding 
loss."* 

With the appearance of Revelation we find this 
agency at once utilized. The Old Testament 
Religion was set in the framework of Art. 
Symbols were everywhere employed as the 
teachers of sacred truth. The glittering Shekinah, 
or emblem of the divine glory ; the altar, typify- 
ing the one great sacrifice for sin ; the golden 
candlestick, a symbol of the holy light of revela- 
tion; all were of a "typical character, and eminently 
subservient to the religious instruction and benefit 
of mankind, by shadowing forth in their leading 
features the grand truths of the Christian 

* The Architectural Record, Vol. II, No. 3, p. 352. 



1 66 

Church."* Our blessed Lord illustrated the same 
general principles in His instructions. His system 
of teaching was largely parabolic. His most ex- 
quisite lessons were uttered in parables. The 
similitudes between nature and truth He artfully 
applied to moral uses. The Lily, the Vine, the 
Flowers of the field, the Wheat and the Tare, 
afforded Him apt object lessons. The book of 
Revelation most notably exemplifies this princi- 
ple. It is chiefly constructed of religious sym- 
bology. From first to last, it is a grand and 
majestic gallery of sacred art. The sublimest 
dispensations of God in the destiny of the Church, 
and in the fate of the world, are here painted in 
types and symbols on the canvass of inspiration. 

How natural, then, that artistic representation 
of the true and divine should be enlisted in the 
service of Christianity. And history shows this 
to be the case. The earliest illustrations we 
have, of course, are in the Catacombs. Says the 
Church historian, Kurtz : "The great abundance 
of paintings on the walls of the catacombs, of 
which many belong to the second century, some 
indeed, perhaps, to the last decades of the first 
century, served to show how general and lively 

*Jamieson-Fausset-Crown Commentary, p. 65. 



1 67 

was the artistic sense among the earliest 
Christians."* These catacombs where the perse- 
cuted Christians fled, were really Churches, con- 
taining their sanctuaries of worship, and their 
altars on which were celebrated the Holy Sacra- 
ment. The artistic designs were numerous 
symbolical devices of the Christian faith. The 
principal one, however — in the desire to reproduce 
which, beyond doubt, all Christian Art. originated 
— was the figure of Jesus Christ. He is repre- 
sented in all conceivable Scripture forms, the one 
most in favor being that of the Good Shepherd. 
When, after the victory of Christianity through 
Constantine, Churches were built and ecclesiasti- 
cal art more developed, ''the centre of the 
whole house of God was the altar, since the fifth 
century, commonly of stone, often overlaid with 
gold and silver."f In the great Cathedrals of the 
Middle Ages the instinct for Christian Art em- 
bodied itself in those imposing edifices which will 
forever remain the noblest monuments of 
the genius of man, exalted by the sentiment of 
pious devotion. The loftiest of these is the 
magnificent Lutheran Cathedral at Ulm, beoom in 
1377 and completed in 1844, holding 30,000 peo- 

*Church History, Vol. I, p. 215. 
fChurch History, Kurtz, Vol. I, p. 384. 



1 68 

pie, adorned with the richest paintings and 
sculptures, and with a spire of 528 feet, 16 feet 
higher than the famous Cologne Cathedral. 

In the Reformation two typical leaders were at 
the helm. One of these was Luther, the other 
Zwingli, and later, Calvin. Luther, as the larger 
personality, the more eminent Christian, and the 
more intensely human and genial, naturally favored 
Art. He had a poetic soul, and a mystical devo- 
tion, which interpreted the divine and infinite, in 
all the forms of nature and art. Accordingly, he 
writes : " It is not my opinion that the arts are to 
be destroyed by means of the Gospel, as some 
super-spiritualists [Zwingli, Carlstadt, etc.] give 
out, but I should like to see all the arts enlisted 
in the service of Him who has given and created 
them."* On the specific point as to the repre- 
sentation of Christ in the Church, which was in 
dispute between the Lutheran and the Reformed 
Churches, Luther makes this striking argument : 
"The Scripture has pictures. Hence I may for 
the sake of memory and a better understanding, 
paint them on the wall. In like manner, when I 
contemplate the sufferings of Christ, there projects 
itself in my heart the picture of a man hanging 

*Luthardt's Moral Truths of Christianity, p. 391. 



169 

upon the cross. Now, if it is no sin that I have 
the picture in my heart, why should it be a sin tf 
I have it in tJie eye> especially when the heart is of 
more importance than the eye ? " This fine answer, 
says Dr. Dorner, "decides the relation of [Luth- 
eran] Protestantism to Art. The poetic, genial, 
and ideal feeling of Luther will as little dispense 
with the divine gift of painting as music, but will 
rather see them employed in the interest of 
religion."* Never had a man a greater tempta- 
tion to go to an extreme. Zwingli, Carlstadt, and 
the Reformed, cried out that these artistic devices 
were Romish, and the paintings were torn from 
the walls, and the crosses broken on the altars. 
But Luther, with true wisdom, refused to argue 
from the abuse of a good principle against its 
proper use. In indignant protest he denounced 
these fanatical extremists, in a series of sermons 
of burning eloquence and power. And he 
judiciously selected the golden mean. 

While Zwingli thus wished to do away with 
organ playing, instrumental music, etc., and Calvin 
would not tolerate altars, crosses, and candles, in 
the Churches, a wise moderation prevailed in the 
Lutheran Church. The principles of the great 

*IIistory of Protestant Theology, Vol. I, p. 146. 



I/O 

founder of Protestantism passed over to the 
Church called after his name. V In Romish wor- 
ship all appealed to the senses, and in that of the 
Calvinistic Churches all appealed to the under- 
standing ; but in the Lutheran worship both sides 
of human nature were fully recognized, and a 
proportionate place assigned to each. Altars 
ornamented with candles and crosses were allowed 
to remain, not as objects of worship, but rather 
to aid in exciting and deepening devotion."* 

This employment of sacred art in the building 
of Churches, and in their interior and altar 
appointments and decorations, has accordingly 
become characteristic of Lutheran, as contrasted 
with Calvinistic and Reformed Churches all over 
the world.f The only exception is that of the 

♦Church History, Kurtz, Vol. II. p. 364. 

"I* "The Lutheran Church designates different colors for the 
different seasons of the year, so that the Church's joy or sorrow 
may be taught by the eye as well as by the ear. These various 
colors, used in the several services of the Church, are all symbolical 
and add solemnity to the devout worship of Almighty God in His 
house. White is a symbol of purity, joy, life, and light, and is used 
on the Festivals of Christmas, Easter, and the Ascension of our 
Lord, and on Whit-Sunday, on Trinity Sunday, and on the dedica- 
tion of a Church. Violet or Purple-, the symbol of penitence and 
sorrow, is used during Advent and Lent Seasons, and at funerals. 
Green, the symbol of hope and peace, and Red, the symbol of divine 
love and royal dignity, are used from Trinity Sunday until Advent. 
Black, the symbol of death, is used on Good Friday." — The Church 
Year, Rev. W. H. Gotwald, D.D. 



I/I 

Episcopal Church, where these artistic uses were 
borrowed from the Lutheran, and not borrowed 
by us from the Episcopal, as is sometimes supposed 
by the misinformed. Their Lutheran origin is 
fully admitted by the distinguished Episcopal 
scholar, Dean Stanley. Speaking of the changes 
which occurred in Queen Elizabeth's time, he 
writes: "The Lutheran element remained too 
strongly fixed to be altogether dislodged. Luth- 
eranism was, in fact, the exact shade which colored 
the mind of Elizabeth, and of the divines who 
held to her. Her altar was the Lutheran altar!'* 
"In her doctrine Elizabeth was a moderate 
Lutheran. "f 

Dr. Schaff not only admits this distinction of 
sacred art as belonging to the Lutheran, as over 
against the other Protestant Churches, but really 
accords it the superiority, thus : " Lutheranism 
draws the fine arts into the service of religion. 
The Reformed communion is much poorer in this 
respect. It aimed at the greatest simplicity in 
religion, which in Presbyterianism and Puritanism 
is certainly carried to excess. Mrs. Beecher 
Stowe, though herself a Puritan, in describing the 
wondrous beauties of nature in Switzerland, 

*Christian Institutions, p. 89. 

fOutlinesof Universal History, Prof. Fisher, Yale College, p. 43. 



172 

makes the significant remark : ' One thing is cer- 
tain : He who made the world is no utilitarian, no 
despiser of the fine arts, and no condemner of 
ornament, and those religionists, who seek to 
restrain everything within the limits of cold, bare 
utility, do not imitate our Father in heaven. The 
instinct to adorn and beautify is from Him ; it 
likens us to Him, and if rightly understood, 
instead of being a siren to beguile our hearts 
away, it will be the closest of affiliating bands.' "* 
In America, the financial weakness of many of 
our struggling Churches, the absence of wealth, 
with its attendant opportunity for culture, and 
still more, the prevalence for so long a period of 
extreme Calvinistic and Puritanic conceptions of 

*Lutheranism and Reform, Schaff, p. 175. 

While the whole history of the Lutheran Church thus shows her 
distinctive attitude and practice, as appreciative of the positive 
uses and benefits of sacred art, and while the advocacy of these 
principles is especially needed at this time to counteract prevalent 
prejudices, yet the Lutheran Church would none the less protest 
against making them essential and binding upon the conscience. 
Sacred Art, however important, still rests upon the grounds of ex- 
pediency, and as such, belongs to the sphere of liberty. Hence the 
Lutheran Observer is quite correct in this recent editorial : " However, 
the whole matter of Church decoration with Christian symbols and 
other works of art, within appropriate limits, belongs to the adia- 
p/iora, or things indifferent and non-essential, and these are free to 
be used or not, according to the taste or preference of congrega- 
tions, so far as not forbidden in the Scriptures." 



i73 

worship, moulding and tincturing religious thought 
in all communions, have to the present time, pre- 
vented the Lutheran Church from assuming her 
true place with respect to the use of sacred art. It 
is, as Dr. Wolf truly remarks in his review of Dr. 
Schaff's Church History in the Lutheran Quar- 
terly, January 1893 : "One of the most instructive 
features of this volume is its disclosure of the 
truth that almost all those things against which 
Lutherans have to battle incessantly within their 
own Church, are importations from the Churches 
of Zwingli and Calvin. The Puritans brought 
with them to this country the favorite ideas and 
practices of these Reformers so far as they 
antagonized the Lutheran Reformers, and when 
our feeble English Churches were struggling for 
existence, they somehow fell into the ways of 
Calvinism — probably because their pastors had 
received their training from Calvinist schools and 
Puritan authors. The denial of quickening grace 
in Baptism, of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, 
the opposition to pictures in the Churches, to 
altars, crosses, candles, clerical robes, etc., have 
come to us from either Zwingli, or Calvin, or 
both." 

The ground of these objections is laid upon 
Romish and Ritualistic abuses. But these objec- 



174 

tions would on the same ground sweep away the 
essentials of Christianity. The Scriptures, the Sac- 
raments, the Apostle's Creed, the Festivals, the rite 
of Confession, the authority of the Church, are all 
similarly abused in the Romish Church. Dare we, 
therefore, reject them? Whatever then is right, and 
true, and useful in itself, we are notto discard,because 
of perversions and excesses, but we are to use so 
judiciously as to avoid and reprove those abuses. 
So with Art, as related to Religion. It is 
natural, sustained by Scripture analogy, employed 
by Christ, and an invaluable aid to devotion. It 
is Christian, having characterized the entire his- 
tory of the Christian Church. Moreover, it is 
specifically Lutheran, distinguishing the Lutheran 
from all the Reformed Churches in this regard. 
Now, the question for us, as Lutherans, here in 
America, is this, Will we, as we sometimes here- 
tofore have done join our ecclesiastical opponents 
in decrying our own historic usages? If so, let 
us remember, that " A house divided against itself 
shall not stand" (Matt, xii ; 25). Our Churches 
here cannot be built up from anti- Lutheran ele- 
ments. We may discard ever so much to please 
them ; they will still stay in their own native and 
powerful Churches. But our Lutheran sons and 
daug-hters have been used to a well-defined 






*75 

ecclesiastical art from whatever part of our world- 
wide Church they have come. They bring these 
fond and sacred associations with them, and if we 
will reject Lutheran Churches and altars, and 
other Churches will adopt them, we can only 
expect that they will go where they feel at home. 
And then that irony of American history will 
repeat itself, that, when other Churches have 
drawn the intelligent and cultured by the use of 
our Lutheran custorns, and have grown powerful 
thereby, we will timidly begin to dare to use 
them ourselves. And then the objection will be 
raised that we are borrowing the customs of others. 
Why not be the first ourselves to use our own 
precious historic treasures, and then when others 
want them, compel them to be the borrowers? 
How far better thus to evince a manly self-respect 
and courage! And instead of apologizing for, or 
rejecting our Lutheran heritage, let us boldly es- 
pouse it, and proudly hold it up to the world as 
without a peer. Christendom will only respect the 
Church which first respects itself. The Lutheran 
Church with regard to Sacred Art, like so many 
other things, has nothing to be ashamed of. On 
the contrary, her history here shows her to be in 
harmony with primitive usage, with Scripture, and 
with the most cultured minds and gifted souls of the 



176 

human race. Of no Lutheran feature can we have a 
juster pride, none is in closer touch with the trend 
of modern thought, nor is there one that will 
more recommend her as the Church worthy to be 
a leader of the Church Universal. Her motto is : 
"In Christianity, pictorial and sculptured repre- 
sentations, are language made visible, symbolized 
thought,"* divine lessons presented through the 
eye, which God has made an organ for the recep- 
tion of truth as well as the ear. 

Lutheran Churches are sanctuaries where on 
every side religion breathes, sacred visions hold 
the eye, whispers of the divine reach the soul, and 
the footseps of God grow audible. The Lutheran 
altarf is a veritable Holy of Holies, a staircase to 
the invisible, an arcanum, where the soul com- 
munes with the glorified Savior, and bathes in 
the licrht of infinite love. In the Lutheran 
Sanctuary, Art uses her every gift to make 
audible and visible the truths of Christianity, and 
to invest, with a rich and sacred halo, the senti- 
ment of Religion. 

*Fundamental Truths of Christianity, Luthardt, p. 148. 

fThe Lutheran Church is the only Protestant Church which 
strictly has an Altar, and uses that term in her formularies of wor- 
ship. In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, the word "Altar" 
was stricken out by the Calvinistic revisers, and "Communion 
Table" substituted. 



177 

As an instructive illustration of the manner in 
which the Lutheran Church, in its attitude respect- 
ing Sacred Art, is in sympathy with the best 
progressive tendencies of the age, we append to 
this chapter the following extract from a valuable 
paper on this theme, which recently appeared in 
that widely circulated religious publication, " The 
Homiktic Review:" "The conclusion of these 
phases of the whole subject is, that paintings, 
pictures, reproductions of the pathos and power 
of many of them, have been positive means of 
Christian education, thorough conversions, and 
the perseverance in saintliness of the persons thus 
converted. Savanarola, in the cloisters and cells 
of his convent, was deeply moved by the paint- 
ings of Angelico, whose art was worship and for 
the advancement of the Church. Zinzendorf, the 
founder of the first Protestant missionary Church, 
was converted by contemplating a picture of the 
crucifixion, which bore the inscription : 

' I did this for thee ; 

What hast thou done for me? ' 

If there has been one offering on the altar of the 
Lord, which has has been devotional in aim and 
spirit equal to sacred music and poetry, it is sacred 
pictorial art. The Bible and the Christ have been 
reproduced in this form according to the gifts 



178 

bestowed by nature and by grace. Such portrai- 
ture has been given, and the objections to it are 
similar to the objections to written lives of Christ 
by Farrar and Edersheim, Geikie and Beecher, 
and to the sermons of the best preachers, and 
even to the records of the evangelists themselves. 
Protestantism in this particular has been wrong 
and Puritanism too. The reaction has been from 
one extreme to the other. There has been little 
attempt to gain and keep the golden mean."* 

♦New York, May, 1893. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



LUTHERAN UNITY. 



WHEN our Lord prayed that all His disciples 
might be one, he evidently had two ideas 
chiefly in view, viz. spirituality and efficiency. 
For brotherly unity is necessary to piety. Where 
division, distraction, and strife prevail, there can- 
not be the sweet and peaceful spirit of Christ. 
And so efficiency in Christian work depends upon 
unity. As an army torn and sundered by internal 
dissensions can accomplish nothing against the 
foe, so a Church rent by differences and contro- 
versy within its own borders, can do very little 
effective work for Christ. On this account, the 
various denominations have their separate con- 
fessions and usages, in order that those who are of 
one mind can work together in undisturbed 
harmony. 



i8o 

Now the Lutheran Church encounters excep- 
tional difficulties in seeking to attain this* unity. 
Its very strength is here a source of weakness. 
As it is so widely distributed throughout the 
various nationalities and languages of the globe, 
the problem becomes the more difficult to fuse all 
these types into one American Lutheran Church. 
Yet, on the other hand, there are several power- 
ful conditions tending to facilitate this unity. One 
is the personality of Luther, which is so predomi- 
nant and overshadowing among all Lutherans, as 
to be a perpetual force moulding them alike, and 
so drawing them together. Another, is the doc- 
trine of the Lutheran Church that unity does not 
depend upon secondary points, such as identity 
of Church government, or of rites and ceremonies. 
Differences on these adiapJwra are no reason, 
therefore, to hinder true and hearty Lutheran 
unity. These must be regarded with mutual 
tolerance and charity. But even here Lutheran 
worship everywhere has been controlled by the 
type of Luther's Reformation Service, so that an 
essential historical unity of public worship char- 
acterizes Lutherans of all lands, drawing them 
together as one spiritual family. 

Another impulse toward Lutheran unity comes 
from the singular pre-eminence of the Augsburg 



I8l 

Confession. No other Church has any one sum- 
mary of faith enjoying such a unique and universal 
authority over all its various branches, as does 
this venerable symbol. Not a solitary body of 
Lutherans rejects it. Nor does any one propose 
its revision. Wherever there has been individual 
opposition to it, such opposition has been com- 
pelled to succumb to the overwhelming sentiment 
in its favor. "As various kingdoms, states, and 
cities, embraced the faith of God's word, as our 
Church had enfolded it, they accepted this Con- 
fession as their own, and were known as Evan- 
gelical Lutherans because they so accepted it. 
The Church was known as the Church of the 
Augsburg Confession. * * * It is our shield and 
our sword, our ensign and our arming, the con- 
stitution of our state. It is the bo?id of our union 
throughout the world, and by it, and with it, our 
Church as a distinct organization, must stand or 
fall."* 

The idea is sometimes entertained, that a 
serious difference exists among Lutherans on the 
ground that some subscribe the Augsburg Con- 
fession, and others th~. Form of Concord. But 
this is a mistake. Those who in addition subscribe 

Conservative Reformation, Krauth, pp. 262 and 214. 



1 82 

to the later symbols do not do so in any spirit 
of antagonism to the Augsburg Confession, but 
only because they deem the latter a consistent 
explanation and development of the Augsburg 
Confession, so that their subscription to them only 
more firmly seals their subscription to the 
Augustana. Thus says one whose general body 
demands, not of laymen, but of pastors and 
teachers, subscription to the Form of Concord : 
" Those who sincerely adopt the Confession 
of Augsburg and the Catechism, are in accord 
with us. Our controversy with those who 
reject a portion of the Confession, has its ground 
in the conviction that such rejection betrays a 
dissent from the Evangelical doctrine set forth in 
the Augsburg Confession, whose true import and 
meaning the later symbols develop and defend."* 
He, then, who heartily receives the Augsburg 
Confession, in the sense in which our Church has 
always received it, is a Lutlicran^ and no one 
dare gainsay his Lutheranism. Justasun-Lutheran, 
are extra and supra-confessional tests and con- 
ditions as is an infra-confessional laxity. 

As therefore, the Augsburg Confession is thus 
generally and heartily accepted by Lutherans, 

"Trot. M. Loy, D.D., of Joint Synod of Ohio. 



'8 3 

there is more true unity and agreement hi faith and 
spirit among Lutherans than in any other Christian 
body in the world, Writes one of our divines of this 
theological unity: "As we have reason to know, 
the doctrine of the Real Presence is now taught 
in all Lutheran theological seminaries in this 
country, and is held by the vast majority of the 
Lutheran pastors. * * * And as Luther's Small 
Catechism, in its pure text, is used almost uni- 
versally in Lutheran congregations as a manual 
of instruction, the doctrine is taught to the young 
people who are in preparation for the duties and 
benefits of Church membership. "* Consequently, 
it is a matter of certainty, that a number of 
Lutherans assembled together from the wide- 
spread branches of Lutheranism throughout the 
world, could draw up a set of articles of common 
doctrinal agreement, and would find themselves in 
a harmony of spirit, such as could no other Church. 
A remarkable ilhistration of this truth is given in 
the volume that has lately appeared : " Distinctive 
Doctrines and Usages of the General Bodies of 
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United 
States. "f Six of the foremost theologians there 
speak for the bodies they represent, comprising 

*Rev. J. W. Richard, D.D. 

-{•Lutheran Board of Publication, 42 N. Ninth St., Philadelphia. 



1 84 

1,019,323 of our Lutheran communicants in the 
United States. And when we consider the 
amount of doctrinal divergence and looseness 
prevalent in the other denominations in our land, 
the positive hold upon the great Scriptural truths, 
and the close general doctrinal concurrence exhib- 
ited in this volume, constitute the religious phenom- 
enon of the times. All these representative Lutheran 
theologians agree : a. In making the Word of God 
the supreme and only infallible rule of faith and 
practice, " while the symbols [confessions] are 
not considered like the Scriptures, as judges, but 
as a witness and declaration of the faith."* b. All 
accept the Augsburg Confession, without reser- 
vation, as, from beginning to end, "a correct 
exhibition of the fundamental doctrines of the 
divine word and of the faith of our Church, "f 
and "recognize the fact that the Evangelical 
Lutheran Church had her settled faith, and her 
distinctive character, when she witnessed her 
good confession at Augsburg, in 15 30." J "The 
question as to whether one be a Lutheran or 
not, the General Council affirms, must be 
decided from his relation to the doctrines 
of the unaltered Augsburg Confession, and from 

♦Prof. S. Fritschel, D.D., p. 65. 

fProf. M. Valentine, D.D., LL.D., p. 41. 

JProf. M. Loy, D.D., p. 9. 



i8 5 

no other standard whatever."* c. All are one in 
the point that Christian unity is a matter primarily 
of agreement in the faith, and that rites and 
ceremonies, forms of worship, systems of Church 
government, etc., are secondary, and belong to 
the adiaphora (things indifferent). " Christians 
may differ, and in many.cases, owing to different 
circumstances, must differ as to ceremonies, 
external organization, etc. But there is one thing 
concerning which all Christians of all times and 
of all countries should perfectly agree — they 
should be one in faith and doctrine."^ d. And 
every one of these writers, while "never failing 
to distinguish between that which is necessary 
and that which is free," yet "love the old ways of 
our fathers, and the beautiful forms in which they 
worshiped the Lord." All " recognize the benefits 
of uniformity in the ceremonies and usages of the 
Churches, and heartily seek to promote it." All 
"desire, even in externals, to walk in the old 
paths and manifest their historical connection with 
the old Church. "J 

Such a unanimity of sentiment — every writer, 
from what is generally considered the most 

*Prof. H. E. Jacobs, D.D., LL.D., p. 57. 
fProf. F. Pieper, p. 137. 
|Prof. M. Loy, D.D., p. 10. 



1 86 

moderate, the General Synod, to that which is 
commonly looked on as most extreme, the 
Synodical Conference, endorsing absolutely the 
one great Augsburg Confession in all its teach- 
ings, covering the whole main system of Scriptural 
doctrine — is a fact without parellel in any other 
denomination. No approach to such concurrence 
could be shown elsewhere. The bare thought of 
it would be considered utterly chimerical. '* As to 
the substance of what is known as Lutheran all 
the writers agree. All accept the Augsburg Con- 
fession as the original and true confession of 
Lutheran doctrine, and consent that whoever 
heartily accepts the doctrinal statements of this 
Confession is a Lutheran, not in name, but in 
fact."* The evidences, then, in this remarkable 
series of papers, of essential unity on the part of 
the various Lutheran bodies of the United States, 
is one that should fill every Lutheran heart with 
encouragement, while it should attract the 
thoughtful attention and study of other bodies of 
Christians. 

As a consequence of this fundamental unity, 
the Lutheran Church is the only branch of 
Protestantism that has never generated sects, 
not a single one having sprung from her, while 

* The Lutheran World. 



i87 

the other wing of Protestantism has unfortunately 
had a multitudinous progeny of this character. 
In a recent editorial, "A Marvel in History," 
the Eastern Lutheran utters these indisputable 
words: "There has been no schism in the 
Lutheran Church from the beginning. There 
have been differences in language, and customs, 
and modes of worship, but there is only one 
Evangelical Lutheran Church in the world to-day. 
While the Lutheran half of Protestantism has come 
down unbroken through the centuries, the other half 
— the Reformed half — has been broken into frag- 
ments, and comprises all the other denominations 
of Christendom. It is reported that the census- 
takers found 150 denominations, or sub-divisions 
of denominations, in this country, in 1890. The 
Lutheran Church is not responsible for the 
divisions of Protestantism. If the Augsburg Con- 
fession had been accepted by all in 1530, there 
might have been a unity of the Protestant Church 
to-day, as there is a unity of Catholicism. The 
fact that the Reformed part has broken into so 
many fragments, shows the weakness of its 
ecclesiastical platform. That the Lutherans have 
remained united for over three and a half centu- 
ries is a marvel, and it shows the strength of 
their ecclesiastical foundation." 



1 88 

These being the facts, their exists no sound 
excuse for our divisions in America. And as Dr. 
Jacobs truly says : " The problem of the hour for the 
Lutheran Church in America, is, how to unite 
these various elements in the historical faith of 
the Lutheran Church, as embodied in her histori- 
cal confessions, and with the worship prescribed 
in her historical Liturgies and Church Orders."* 
The two greatest foes to this auspicious result 
are the extremists. The one, the party who 
would insist on extra-confessional and unhistorical 
tests. And the other, who are more eager to 
unite and fellowship with non- Lutherans than 
with those of their own household. Putting aside 
both these supra- and infra- Lutherans, why should 
not the Lutheran Church in this country be one? 

In the Providence of God, despite all her mis- 
takes and losses, she has now attained a com- 
manding position here both theologically and 
numerically. She is known and recognized as one 
of the foremost ecclesiastical bodies of the land. 
But this lack of unity, and these contending 
General Bodies, with the synods and congrega- 
tions maintaining an independent attitude, arc 
our greatest element of weakness, and the chief 

♦Preface to "The Lutheran Movement in England," p. 8. 



obstacle in the path of our growth, success, and 
influence. Our sorest need is, as the patriarch 
Muhlenberg said : " Unity — a twisted cord of 
many threads will not break." God has laid 
upon us a weighty responsibility, as he has also 
given us an unrivalled opportunity in this Western 
World. And, bound together by such strong and 
close ties of faith, usage and history, what we 
need above all things is to be one. 

And to effect this we should not misrepresent 
our Lutheran brethern, of any branch or synodi- 
cal connection of our Church, not seek to fan 
prejudices against them, and especially not take 
up the inuendoes and perversions of other de- 
nominations, and hurl them at those of our own 
faith and name. And by mutual charity, tolerance, 
sympathy, and good-will, we can come together, 
and work together, and march under the same 
banner, as one great, undivided Lutheran host, 
in this Western World. As indicative of the 
tendency at present prevailing, the Independent 
has lately had a colloquium of representative 
writers, on Lutheran Unity, in which Dr. Valentine 
for the General Synod, says : " Is the suggestion 
practicable? It ought to be. For these different 
bodies are all Lutheran bodies, the differences in 
their confessional basis being no greater than 



190 

have always existed within the Lutheran Church. 
The points in disagreement, causing the divisions, 
do not belong to essentials. It were absurd for 
any one of these bodies to claim that its title to 
Lutheranism consists in the things in which it 
differs from all the other bodies. Its Lutheranism 
is made, not by the peculiarities in which it sepa- 
rates from all the rest, but by the truth and 
Church life which it maintains in common with 
them, the essential Lutheran system of doctrine." 
Dr. Jacobs, for the General Council, writes : "The 
Lutheran Church humbly claims to stand for the 
very widest basis possible for Christian union. 
Three centuries have passed, and the representa- 
tives of the various European Lutheran Churches 
are meeting in America. They have not come at 
once, but in successive waves of emigration, so 
that before one is organized and Americanized, 
it is overwhelmed by new accessions, among 
whom the same process is to be repeated. Who 
can be surprised that all are not united into one 
compact, homogeneous and well-organized general 
body? Has not much been gained, according to 
the showing of Dr. Carroll's statistics, that of 
1,199,514 communicants 838,938 have been 
gathered into three general organizations ? " Prof. 
Pieper, speaking for the Missouri Conference, 



I9i 

after remarking various advances toward unifica- 
tion, says : " Still, there is a bad residue of 
divisions in the Lutheran Church, causing a great 
waste both of men and money. The gain to the 
Lutheran Church would be enormous if a perfect 
consolidation in the Lutheran families could be 
effected. But how could this be done? The 
Lutheran Church has no peculiar ecclesiastical 
system nor any special rites to insist upon. All 
these things she classes with the 'adiaphora.' 
But the great stress is laid upon harmony in the 
Biblical doctrine. It was on this line of proceed- 
ing that practical results toward consolidation 
were obtained in the Lutheran Church. On this 
principle the Michigan Synod last year united 
with the Synodical Conference. Lately so-called 
"Free Conferences" were held between members 
of the Synodical Conference and other Lutheran 
bodies with the same object in view. Thus a 
campaign for consolidation is carried on." 

Certainly, these are notable signs of the times. 
How much greater is the Lutheran unity pre- 
vailing now than a quarter of a century ago, and 
it is growing more and more every year. Instead 
of a dozen parties, each nursing its own narrow, 
little, one-sided, Lutheran phase, one supreme 
historical Lutheran ideal — the world-wide type 



192 

— is gradually shaping all parties in accordance 
with it. And this is surely bringing all together. 
Lutheran unity is in the air! Nor can any petty, 
partisan narrowness withstand its advance. Let 
all join in the fervent hope expressed by Bishop 
von Scheele, during" his visit amono- us, "that our 
great Church, in this country, might be united on 
the basis of the Augsburg Confession."' Speed 
the grand consummation! Let every minister 
and every layman, instead of fomenting strife, 
and fanning the fire of prejudice, pray and strive 
for this auspicious end. 

And with a united Lutheran Church in America, 
how nobly will our grand ecclesiastical mother 
take the leading position that belongs to her, how 
clearly will her testimony shine forth for the 
Word and Sacraments, and what effective service 
can she render for the advancement of the kingdom 
of God! 



CHAPTER XX. 



ENGLISH AXD FOREIGX-SPEAKIXG LUTHERANS. 

THE other Protestant Churches in the United 
States practically come from but one 
country, viz. Great Britain, and hence generally 
speak the English language. But Lutherans, 
coming from all the countries of Europe, pre- 
dominantly speak foreign tongues. Prof. Boyesen 
estimates that nearly one-third of the population 
of New York City is German-speaking. In 
Chicago the proportion is about the same. The 
last decade brought a million and a half Germans 
to our shores. The oreat Xorth West is filling 
up with Lutherans. Wisconsin alone has 1 50,000 
German voters. There are more than one-third 
as many Norwegians here as in Norway. One- 
half the population of Minnesota is Scandinavian. 
So marvelous has been our foreign growth in the 



194 



great West that it is the surprising fact that there 
are 300 more Lutheran Churches west of Chicago 
than east of that city, and 80,000 more communi- 
cants. As a result, the Lutheran is the Church 
of many tongues in America. 

The Government Census for 1890 thus tabulates 
Lutheran communicant members, according to 
lanooiao-e : 



German, 

German-English, 

English, 

Norwegian, 

Swedish, 

Danish, 

Icelandic, - 

Finnish, 



454.005 
232,512 
198,997 
190,154 
88,700 

13-674 
1,991 

1.385 



1,181,418 
This table shows that the foreign-speaking 
Lutherans of America outnumber the purely 
English-speaking, in the proportion of 5 to 1. 
Or, in round numbers, there are only 200,000 
English Lutherans, as against 1,000,000 speaking- 
foreign tongues. With these foreign -speaking 
members, the Lutheran is one of the most power- 
ful denominations in America; without them, one 
of the weakest and most insignificant. Now, the 



195 

problem before the Lutheran Church is, how to 
effect the transition of these foreign-speaking 
members into the English-speaking Churches. 
Upon this, it is self-evident, depends almost our 
very existence in the future. As our country fills 
up and emigration ceases, the foreign languages 
will inevitably die, and with them will also dis- 
appear the Churches using them. Lutheranism 
can only then survive in the English tongue. And 
every German, Swede, Norwegian, Dane, etc., 
who is a true Lutheran in heart, must desire 
before all else, the progress and welfare of the 
English Lutheran Church. The monument to 
perpetuate German and Scandinavian religious 
life and character in this country can never be 
language, it can alone be the faith and spirit of 
the Lutheran Church. As the Swedish Bishop 
von Scheele truly said in his address to the 
Swedish students of Bethany College, Lindsburg, 
Kansas, speaking of the question of language : 
" It lies in the very nature of the case that the 
rising generation should be taught in the English 
language, as any other course would, in America, 
be abnormal, since English is the language of 
America." 

And the supreme difficulty that our English 
Lutheran Church encounters here, is the indiff- 



196 

erence, and often apparent antagonism, of our 
foreign-speaking members to our English 
Churches. For example, the Dutch Reformed, in 
point of numbers, are altogether insignificant in 
New York City, as compared with the German. 
Yet in that city, the Dutch Reformed have many 
more and more powerful English Churches than 
the Lutherans have, ^nd simply because the 
Dutch were willing to surrender their laneuaee 
in order to save their Church. Their mother faith 
was dearer to them than their mother tongtte. And 
until Germans, Swedes, etc., will rise to the same 
high standard, and illustrate their conviction that 
a Church is not to be restricted to one language, 
and not to be conditioned at all by language, but by 
faith, the progress of our Church in this country 
will continue to be arrested by this rock of 
stumbling. "For our true position and influence 
cannot be rightly achieved as a Church of an alien 
tongue or of alien tongues. However interesting 
and adapted to present necessities our Church's 
polyglot character may now be, the attainment of 
its right rank and influence in this country 
requires it to become as rapidly as possible an 
English-speaking Church."* 

*Frof. M. Valentine, D.D., LL.D., in "Distinctive Lutheran 
Doctrines and Usages," p. 57. 



197 

And yet the English Churches are here perhaps 
quite as much to blame as the foreign Lutheran 
element. They first set this mistaken example, 
that a change of language meant a change of 
Church. When they would establish a. Church in 
the English language, too often they did not seek 
to make it a Lutheran Church, but in the process 
transformed it into a non- Lutheran one. Instead 
of merely changing the language, they changed 
the faith and historic usages. Thus in our early 
American history most of the characteristics of 
the world-wide Lutheran Church were dropped, 
and the peculiarities of the Puritan and*Calvinistic 
Churches — repugnant to the broader, deeper, 
richer spirit of Lutheranism — were adopted. 
The beautiful and devotional liturgical service and 
worship of Lutheranism were discarded, and the 
worship framed after the non- Lutheran Churches. 
And shall Ave wonder, then, that when the foreign 
Lutheran cannot recognize his dear religious 
home, but discerns scarcely any difference between 
it and the non- Lutheran Churches, only that the 
latter are more numerous and powerful, more 
convenient of attendance, and offering; Greater 
social advantages, he should too often allow 
his children to go to them without a protest? 
When nothing of conscience, or of home-like 



198 

feeling is to be gained, why make any sacrifice? 

Until, then, the English Churches first lead the 
way by showing that a change of language does 
not involve an abandonment of Lutheranism, 
they cannot ask or expect foreign-speaking 
Lutherans to rally to their support. But if an 
English Church is Lutheran, if it is faithful to the 
Lutheran doctrine, and if it perpetuates that 
worship and those usages to which the Lutheran 
has been accustomed in his native land, 
then when the foreign Lutheran enters it, he will 
feel at home. And then, the bond of sacred 
traditions, childhood-memories, the love of father- 
land, and early parental instructions, will draw him 
like an irresistible magnet to his own ecclesiasti- 
cal altar. 

In ignoring language then, alike by American 
and Foreigner, and making the Lutheran element 
supreme, alone lies the solution of this linguistic 
problem, which is the gravest practical one before 
us, dwarfing all others. But on the other hand, the 
question naturally arises : Shall we not have a 
distinctively American Lutheran Church here? 
We answer: Certainly, by all means. In every 
country our Church, even when built upon the 
great historic outlines of Lutheranism, will more 
or less in minor matters, be moulded by, and 



199 

reflect the genius and institutions of the land and 
race. It must have the quality of adaptation, 
which Lutheranism has shown itself to possess to 
a remarkable degree, or it could never have taken 
root in so many diverse lands. But to have such 
minor variations is one thing — to essentially trans- 
form the Lutheran character is another. The 
former only shows the flexibility and adaptedness 
of Lutheranism to world-wide conditions, and 
illustrates its rightful claim to universal preva- 
lence. The latter makes the Lutheran Church in 
one country a protest against the Lutheran Church 
of every other country, and so works for its 
injury and destruction. Some Lutherans in their 
intense Americanism forget that nationality has, as 
such, nothing to do with constituting a Church. 
Many Churches, thus, are Lutheran, but not Ameri- 
can, such as the Lutheran Church of Sweden. And 
many Churches again are American, but not 
Lutheran, such as the Presbyterian Church. 
Faith and history, not nationality or language, 
constitute the distinctive features of a Church. 
Consequently, in order to be a Lutheran, it is not 
necessary to be a German, Swede, Dane, or 
Norwegian. Nor, in order to be an American is 
it necessary to drop Lutheran historical charac- 
teristics. True Lutheranism and true American- 



200 



ism make the ideal combination for our Church 
in America. 

To blend all our foreign-speaking elements in 
one great English-speaking American Lutheran 
Church, requires then the disarmament of preju- 
dice on both sides. English-speaking Lutherans 
must abandon anti- Lutheran prejudices as to 
religious customs and usages, which they have 
acquired from Calvinistic associations, and must 
learn to judge more charitably, and with warmer 
appreciation of their foreign Lutheran brethren. 
And foreign-speaking Lutherans must abandon 
their unreasonable and narrow prejudice that the 
great historic Lutheran Church was meant to be 
restricted alone to their particular language, 
which would involve its inevitable belittlement 
and destruction. And, instead of disparaging 
criticism, and going into anti- Lutheran Churches 
in preference to those of their own faith, they 
should appreciate the sacrifices, and the heroism 
displayed by pastors and laymen, in seeking to 
upbuild the Lutheran Church in the English 
language. 

And thus all yoke-fellows of the Lutheran 
household working harmoniously together, with- 
out regard to linguistic antecedents and preju- 
dices, this vexatious reck of offence will at last 



201 

be removed. And there will result a distinctively 
American Lutheran -Church. A Church which, 
while preserving the characteristic faith and 
customs of the universal Lutheran Church, yet is 
in harmony with American spirit and life. For, 
just as the Lutheran Church in Germany has a 
Germanic type that is not of its essence, and in 
Scandinavia has a type resulting from the Scandi- 
navian character, so will and must it be eventually 
here. The Lutheran Church, not in its foreign, 
but in an American phase, moulded in non- 
essentials by, and harmonized with American 
institutions and character, is what must be the 
final resultant on our shores. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

THE LUTHERAN A WORLD-WIDE, OR TRULY 
CATHOLIC CHURCH. 

THE Lutheran Church is not only the oldest, 
but also the greatest of Protestant Churches. 
Numerically, she far outstrips all others. In her 
general distribution, too, she maintains the same 
pre-eminence. The most distinctive and favorite 
term of the Christian Church in ancient times 
was Catholic, i. e., universal. The Jewish and 
Pagan religions were national. That is, they 
were particularistic, narrowed down to a particular 
race or class. There was one religion for the Jew 
and another for the Greek ; one for the freeman 
and another for the slave ; one for the aristocratic 
and another for the menial classes. But it was 
the distinguishing glory of Christianity that it 
abolished all these social and race distinctions. 



It broke down the barriers that separated men 
into antagonistic parties. The Apostle could 
boast: " There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is 
neither bond nor free ; for ye are all one in 
Christ Jesus" (Gal. iii ; 28). That is, the Christian 
is the one universal, or Catholic religion. 

Now this primal condition of Christianity is 
reproduced alone in the Evangelical Lutheran 
Church. It is the Catholic, among the Protestant 
Churches. Its distribution is literally world-wide. 
While the greatest of the other Protestant 
denominations is the Established Church in but 
a single country, the Lutheran is the Established 
or National Church in about thirty-five of the 
governments of the world. Notable among these 
are Prussia,* Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, Meck- 
lenberg, Wurtemberg, Hamburg, Alsace-Lorraine, 
Denmark, Danish West Indies, Sweden, Norway, 
Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, etc., etc. In 
other countries, as in Hungary, the Baltic 
Provinces of Russia, Poland, Lapland, Holland, 
France, Great Britain, and the United States, she 
has a very large part of the Christian membership. 
So, over Asia, Africa and Oceanica — as Australia, 
New Zealand, the Fiji Islands, etc. — her vast 
ecclesiastical household extends. 

♦Predominantly Lutheran, though united with the Reformed. 



204 

It may literally be said, therefore, that there is 
not a continent, country, or island of the sea, 
where this Mother Church of Protestantism does 
not hold up the cross of Jesus, and offer the bread 
and water of life to the souls of men. " From 
the rising- of the sun unto the going down 
thereof" (Psalm 1, i) reaches her vast dominion. 
The Lutheran Church, too, repeats the miracle 
of Pentecost, by preaching the gospel in myriad 
languages. She is the polyglot Church, the 
Church of many tongues. In this world-wide 
communion she embraces no less than seventeen 
reigning sovereigns, and a membership of more 
than fifty millions. 

Zockler's "Religious Statistics of the World" 
gives the number of Lutherans as 47,000,000, 
that of the Episcopalians as about 30,000,000, 
Presbyterians and Congregationalists together 
25,000,000, besides a number of smaller denomi- 
nations as the Methodists, Baptists, etc. But the 
latest statistical tables of Lutherans are as follows: 

Germany, 28,272,000 

Sweden, - - - 5, 000,000 

Denmark, Iceland, etc., 2 369,696 

Norway, - 2,125,000 



Forwarded to page 205, 37,766,696 



205 



Forwarded from page 204, 


37,766,696 


Russia, Finland, Poland, etc. 


, 5,048,000 


Other European Countries, 


216,000 


Asia, 


1 13,000 


Africa, - 


122,976 


Oceanica, 


103,700 


America, 


7,107,800 



50,478,172 

Zockler puts the number of Protestants in the 
world at 150,000,000, while Rand & McNally's 
"Atlas of the World" makes it 108,000,000. Accord- 
ing to the former, the Lutherans are immensely 
the leading denomination numerically, while if 
the latter estimate be correct, their number would 
almost equal that of all the other Protestants 
combined. Think of this vast army of 50,000,000 
of Christians upholding the Lutheran banner 
from Arctic Greenland to Tropical Australia, 
from land to land, and from sea to sea! Verily 
the Churches of the Augsburg Confession en- 
girdle the globe. "Their line is gone out through 
all the earth, and their words to the end of the 
world" (Psalm xix ; 4). 

Is not, this, then a world-wide — a truly Catholic 
Church? And what has given the Lutheran 
Church this universal distribution, this general 



206 



establishment, this door of entrance to all peoples 
and tongues, is her genuine Catholicity of spirit. 
There is nothing narrow, one-sided, bigoted in 
her genius. Bound alone by God's Word, she 
is free, open, and many-sided in her polity and 
life. She does not make essentials of things 
secondary and indifferent. She makes a test of 
nothing that is not Scriptural. Forms of Church 
government, rites and ceremonies of worship, 
questions of casuistry, etc., which in other 
denominations are often made tests of conscience 
and communion, the Lutheran Church justly 
relegates to the sphere of Christian liberty. 

Thus, insisting alone upon those conditions 
which the Scriptures have made fundamental, 
the Lutheran Church by her large Catholicity 
commends herself to widely varying classes and 
races of men. She adapts herself equally to the 
German and the English, the Scandinavian and 
the Slavonic, the Finn and the Lapp, the High 
and the Low Ecclesiastic, the Monarchist and the 
Republican, the learned and the simple. It is this 
broad, generic character, which accounts for her 
world-wide prevalence and popularity, and it is 
this which gives her that feature which should 
ever be the distinguishing mark of the Church of 
Christ, viz. that she is truly Catholic, or universal. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



UNPARALLELED GROWTH IN THE UNITED STATES. 

DEEP as is the interest and just as is the 
pride we feel in the world-wide gre'atness 
of our beloved Church, her condition and pros- 
perity in this our native land, are still of intenser 
interest to us. Her beginnings in America were 
very feeble. The first Lutherans came to 
America in 1621 from Holland, and were perse- 
cuted and repressed by the Dutch, so that it was 
fifty years before they were allowed to build an 
house of worship. This, one of the first Luth- 
eran edifices in America, was erected about 
1663, but soon torn down and succeeded by a 
plain log building, at the corner of Broadway and 
Rector Street, New York City, in 1684. In the 
year 1638 some Swedish Lutheran emigrants 
arrived and founded the Churches on the Dela- 



208 

ware, which later were absorbed by the Episco- 
palians. These Swedes immediately upon 
landing built near Lewes, Delaware, "the first 
Evangelical Lutheran Church on this continent." 

Shortly after, the emigration of German 
Lutherans began. And by the year 1710 they 
were coming in large numbers. In 1734 
the sharp persecution of the Lutherans of Salz- 
burg, drove them out of the fatherland, and a 
large colony settled in Georgia, on the Savannah 
River, near the city of Savannah. Pennsylvania, 
however, became the centre of German Lutheran 
emigration. By the year 1750, the Lutheran 
population of the colony of Pennsylvania num- 
bered 60,000 souls. 

The Lutherans, however, were under the 
greatest disadvantages. Speaking a strange 
tongue, poor and uninfluential, and destitute of 
pastors, Churches, and schools, their spiritual 
condition was deplorable. Scattered as sheep 
without a shepherd, and unable to compete with 
the stronger and native denominations, it was 
inevitable that they and their children should 
largely become the prey of the sects around them. 
No wonder, then, that when* the patriarch 
Muhlenberg arrived in 1842, his heart was so 
depressed as almost to despair of the outlook. 



209 

But what a mighty ecclesiastical organization has 
been developed from this seemingly hopeless 
beginning! 

The following table shows the marvelous 
changes in the century from Muhlenberg's death 
to the present. 





Ministers. 




Churches. 




Communicants. 


1800, - 




JO 




35° 




15,000 


1820, 




170 




850 




35,000 


1830, 




300 




1,000 




55,000 


1840, 




400 




1,200 




120,000 


1850, 




757 




1,624 




143,543 


i860, 




i,i34 




2,017 




235,000 


1870, 




1,933 




3,4i7 




387,746 


1880, 




3,o9 2 




5,388 




694,426 


1890, 




4,692 




7,948 




1,099,868 


1893, 




5, 102 




9,119 




1,234,762 


In 


1748 


Muhlenbe 


rQf organized 



the first 



Lutheran Synod, composed of but seven clerical 
members. Now there are 4 General synods, 
about 100 district and sub-synods, 5,000 ministers, 
nearly 10,000 Churches, and, if the statistics 
were all accurately gathered, about 1,500,000 
communicants. This growth is altogether un- 
paralleled by that of any other ecclesiastical body 
in the United States. The Government Census 
for 1890, in giving the comparative growth of the 
religious denominations in the United States for 



2IO 



the last decade, shows that the Lutherans have 
increased in membership 487,000 and that the 
percentage of increase is as follows : Lutherans, 
68 per cent., Episcopalians, 48 per cent., 
Presbyterians, 39 per cent., Baptists, 37 per cent., 
Congregationalists, 33 per cent., Methodists, 
30 per cent. The Government Census further 
shows that in growth of Church property the 
Lutheran Church has outstripped in the same 
ratio the other five leading denominations. In 
1840, Lutheran Church property amounted in 
value to but the insignificant sum of $2,854,286, 
while in 1890 it had risen to $34,218,234. The 
average value of Church buildings in the General 
Synod and General Council is $7,007.50, the 
highest average of any denomination in the 
United States. During the last decade there 
were erected 3,064 Lutheran Churches. It will 
not do to talk of Christianity declining, when 
there is one denomination in our country, which 
builds upon an average a new Church every 
working day in the week. Commenting on these 
figures, Rev. Dr. Carrol, the Government official 
for taking the religious census, says in the Inde- 
pendent : "The growth of the Lutheran Church 
during the decade last past has been phenomenal. 
While the rate of increase in the entire popula- 



21 I 



tion since 1880, has been a fraction over 28 per 
cent., the Lutheran Church has increased by 68 
per cent., or more than twice the rate of increase 
of the population of the country." 

This amazing numerical and material growth 
has been largely owing to emigration. But no 
less extraordinary also has been the intensive 
growth. The first periodical was The Lutheran 
Observer, published in 183 1, in the English lan- 
guage. Now there are 150 Lutheran periodicals, 
divided among the languages as follows: 55 
English, 51 German, 17 Norwegian, 16 Swedish, 
4 Danish, 1 Icelandic, 4 Finnish, 1 French, and 1 
Hungarian. In 1832 the first college — Pennsyl- 
vania College — was founded; now there are 32 
^Lutheran colleges, with upwards of 5,000 students. 
In 181 5, Hartwick Seminary was our solitary 
theological school, now there are 26 Lutheran 
theological seminaries with nearly 1 ,000 students 
for the ministry. Besides these, there are 10 
Youngs Ladies' Seminaries, and 12 Academies, 
and 66 Orphans' Homes and Institutions of 
mercy. The growth in the publication interests 
has kept pace with other advances. It has not 
been long since Lutheran readers, Sunday 
Schools, etc., were largely dependent upon non- 
Lutheran religious publications. But 20 publica- 



212 

tion houses, many of them large and prosperous, 
now send forth an abundant supply of distinctively 
Lutheran literature. 

And most notable of all has been the growth in 
benevolence. As the Church is advancing from 
poverty to comparative wealth, every branch 
of the Church shows rapid strides in this respect. 
This increased progress is also doubtless largely 
owing to the application of systematic methods 
in the raising of funds. The " Hand Book of 
Lutheranism" places the Synodical contributions 
for benevolence for 1890, at $848,324. With this 
amount no less than 2,162 mission congregations 
and stations have been maintained in bur rapidly 
expanding Home Mission field. The great 
States and Territories of the West are filling up* 
more largely with Lutherans than any others. 
Foreign Missions are maintained in India, Africa, 
and Japan, for which larger amounts are appro- 
priated every year.* Individual beneficence is 
growing, as is shown by the more frequent and 
liberal gifts and bequests to the benevolent 
aeencies of the Church. 

*The contributions to the single cause of Foreign Missions, for 
the biennium closing with 1892, made by the General Synod alone, 
with but one-seventh of the Lutheran membership of the country, 
amounted to $105,127.00! 



213 

The unparalleled growth of the Lutheran 
Church in the United States, in all these respects, 
is a matter of surprise and solicitude to our 
brethren of other households. Surveying the 
ecclesiastical horoscope, they marvel at this 
"rising denomination," this '"new ecclesiastical 
star" of the first magnitude, ascending the 
religious firmament. But there is nothing either 
startling or strange in the phenomenon. It is 
simply that the Mother of Protestantism is pre- 
paring to enfold all her children in her arms. It 
is that the leading Church of the old world is 
coming on, step by step, to take possession of 
the new. 

And while this marvelous growth must thrill 
every Lutheran heart, what responsibilities it 
devolves upon each conscientious member! 
Seasons of growth are critical seasons — times of 
opportunity and labor. Never was there such 
an obligation laid upon the Lutherans of any 
country or age, as upon those of the rapidly 
developing Church in the United States. May 
they have the energy, the judiciousness, and the 
consecration, to be equal to the hour! 



CHAPTER XXIII. 



LOYALTY TO THE LUTHERAN CHURCH. 



PATRIOTIC loyalty — love of one's native 
land — , and domestic loyalty — devotion to 
one's own home — , are justly esteemed among 
the first virtues. How much stronger reason, 
then, is there for Church loyalty — unswerving 
fidelity to our ecclesiastical mother, the Church 
which gave us spiritual birth, and tenderly nursed 
and fostered us to spiritual maturity. If the 
traitor and the filial ingrate be shunned among 
men, what shall we say of the one who despises 
his parental Church, and deliberately spurns his 
own ecclesiastical household and family! Accord- 
ingly, devotion to our mother Church is one of 
the most sacred Christian obligations. Phillips 
Brooks well said that "the man who loves the 
universal Church the most, will be the truest to 



215 

his own particular Church. "* It is the one whose 
religious convictions are vague and superficial, 
who is ever ready to cry that one Church is as 
good as another. Loyalty to our own Church 
does not keep us from loving and appreciating 
Christians of other households, but it does demand 
that we love ours the more, and give to it our 
respect, our service, and our defence. There are 
Churches we could name whose members are 
remarkable for this unfaltering fidelity, and what 
vantage of strength and influence it gives them! 

The degree of our loyalty naturally depends 
upon the character of that object which calls it 
forth. Thus, American patriotism should be 
exceptionally strong on account of the singular 
glory of his country which thrills the breast of 
every true American with pride. And so the 
Church love of the Lutheran has more stirring 
reasons to incite it, than that of any other. 
Writes one of our most intelligent laymen : "We 
have in our Lutheran Church, doctrine that is 
pure, a refinement and good taste exhibited in 
her forms and services, that must satisfy the 
most fastidious, and a history to which all 
Christendom does homage. Let us love it ; and 

♦Yale Lectures on Preaching, p. 227. 



2l6 

let us show our faith by our works."* How true 
this is? Where is the Church whose faith can 
stand the test of Scripture as ours, or that 
has behind it so illustrious a history? And 
ought not these considerations to inspire within 
the hearts of her children emotions of unequalled 
love and pride? 

And yet, what are the facts? It must be con- 
fessed, we fear, that perhaps no Church in 
America seems to have so light a hold upon her 
sons and daughters as the Lutheran. How many 
are always ready to look up to other Churches, 
while disposed to regard disdainfully their own. 
And how common it is for Lutherans to be ready 
to seize the slightest occasion to sever the bonds 
that hold them to their own Church! How many 
Lutherans there are who do not honor and revere 
their own historic characteristics, and instead of 
holding them up for others to imitate, are ever 
eager to be copying from others. How often, 
too, when a prejudice is found to exist against an 
honored Lutheran usage, the disposition is to defer 
too greatly to it. Whereas, the only successful way 
to disarm prejudice against a rightful custom is 
by its courageous use. Such a manly course 



'St. James' Lenten Messenger^ New York, 1888. 



2T7 

will at once demonstrate the groundlessness of 
the objection, and bring honor upon the Church 
and its practices. 

Why is it that we have sustained such incalcu- 
lable losses from time to time, and that in the 
o-reat cities we are not in the lead as we should 

o 

be? It is largely on account of the flaccid fibre 
of so much of Lutheran loyalty. It is because of 
that lack of Church love which springs from lack 
of character and intelligence. "A man with a 
heart," said Frederick William III. to Napoleon, 
"will remember the cradle in which he was 
rocked when a child." So, a want of Church 
loyalty springs primarily from the defect of 
religious principle, and the lack of a true self- 
respect. But, secondarily, it proceeds from the want 
of knowledge. It is more frequently ignorance than 
anything else that causes many nominal Lutherans 
to regard slightingly the Lutheran Church, and 
to be holding others in esteem above it. " There 
was a time when the dominant tendency was to 
glory that we are like everybody, and conse- 
quently nothing in ourselves, living by mere 
sufferance, despised by others as those having 
little respect for themselves. Suddenly, as the 
cloud lifted, the great proportions of our Church, 
her vast heritage, her wonderful structure of 



2l8 

theology, her rich treasures in every department 
of religious literature, and her active work in so 
many spheres of beneficence, come to view. 
How easy now to glory that we are Lutherans! "* 
Intelligent people in other Churches need not be 
told of the Lutheran Church, and are accustomed 
to look up to it with the greatest respect. It is a 
sad commentary therefore on the ignorance of 
our own members, when they are deficient in 
esteem and love for the house of their faith and 
of their fathers. 

A higher type of Lutheran Church loyalty is 
then one of our most imperative needs. It is not 
numbers but quality — unfaltering devotion — that 
makes a Church efficient and progressive. In a 
crisis of unwonted peril, Caesar would lean upon 
none but his famous tenth legion, because he 
knew he could trust their loyalty to the last. 
They would die before they would betray or dis- 
honor the Roman standard. So Lutherans, 
while not disparaging, or thinking uncharitably 
of any other Church, should cling to their own 
Church, bear high its standard, defend it from 
misrepresentation, and do and sacrifice for it, 
with a devotion that knows no tire. 



♦Introduction to "Lutherans in America," p. 10. 



219 

The scroll of Lutheran Church history is em- 
blazoned with some of the brightest examples of 
Church love that shed honor upon Christendom. 
And so, let us trust that the era of Lutheran 
indifference, denominational laxity, and want of 
self-respect in our American Lutheran Church, is 
reaching the stage of "innocuous desuetude." 
All signs indicate rather that a new epoch is upon 
us when the old adage will be proven, "once a 
Lutheran, always a Lutheran." And when no 
other denomination of Christians can boast a 
stronger and more uncompromising Church love 
than that which characterizes an Evangelical 
Lutheran. When Lutheran parents feel a deep 
solicitude that their children should perpetuate 
their family name in honorable place in the Luth- 
eran Church, and when Lutheran sons and 
daughters feel that it is a tribute of willing 
reverence to their parents to abide in the spiritual 
house of their fathers, then will our numerous 
losses cease, and will our beloved Church have 
pride and not humiliation in her children. 

Assault who may, kiss and betray, 

Dishonor and disown, 
My Church shall still be dear to me — 

My fathers' and my own ! 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



FUTURE OF THE LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA. 



WHEN we bear in mind how conspicuously 
the Lutheran is the leading Protestant 
Church of Europe, and how phenomenal her 
recent growth has been in America, we are 
naturally disposed to raise the question, "What 
shall be her future in this Western World?" 
We have seen that during the last decade the 
Lutheran Church has increased at a ratio more 
than twice that of the increase of the population 
of the country. If this ratio of progress con- 
tinues, it is evident that a very great future 
destiny is before us. But this future largely 
depends upon our denominational wisdom or 
folly. In the past our blunders have been almost 
as phenomenal as our advance, so that we have 
grown, as it were, in spite of ourselves. Every 



221 

one knows that our losses have been almost 
incalculable, and that other denominations have 
largely flourished upon our best material. Patrick 
Henry said he knew of no other lamp by which 
to guide his feet onward than the lamp of experi- 
ence. And so, a study of the causes that have 
hindered our progress in the past, and cost us 
such great losses, will best serve to guard us 
against these mistakes in the future. To make, 
then, the most of the rare denominational opportu- 
nity which Providence has placed in our hands, 
let us note these lessons. 

First, let us repress fraternal strife, and inter- 
synodical prejudices, jealousies, and contentions. 
And, bound together by the tie of Lutheran unity, 
let all work together with the common purpose to 
advance our beloved Zion. 

Let us, too, frown down, what a prominent 
German Lutheran minister has aptly termed "the 
linguistic devil." Let it rather be a glory to our 
Church that she is the Church of many tongues, 
than to make it a theme of reproach and an apple 
of discord. Let not the German or Scandinavian 
entertain the bigoted thought that Lutheranism 
is limited to his narrow native tongue, and that 
one cannot be a Lutheran if he uses the English 
laneuaee. And he who founds an English Lu- 



222 

theran Church, must not commit the equally grave 
error, of seeking to establish a totally new Church, 
rejecting that historic faith and those historic 
usages, without which the Church he frames has 
no claim whatever to the title Lutheran. In 
short, the Church in America must be Lutheran, 
and not something else. And it must more and 
more largely every year, and eventually altogether, 
use the English language. A Church in a foreign 
tongue can never come into thorough contact 
with the life of a people. And such an un- 
American Church will be but a diminishing 
influence, and ever have a more and more lan- 
guishing life. Our Church's future in this land 
depends most largely upon the good common- 
sense with which our foreign-speaking Lutherans 
will adapt themselves to the situation, and upon 
their loyally bringing up their sons and daughters 
in English Lutheran Churches. An unnatural 
effort to retain them in a Church with a foreign 
tongue, or indifferently allowing them to go to a 
non- Lutheran Church, will but repeat the regret- 
ful story of the past. " There is no reason why, 
if properly administered, the Lutheran Church 
should not be as influential in this country, as any 
religious communion that has found a home here. 
But to attain this end, some very important factors 



must be regarded. The Church feeling as dis- 
tinguished from the merely congregational must 
be diligently cultivated, and our people must learn 
that the interests of the Church are far more 
important than those of any congregation. Then 
the Lutheran Church feeling must also be asserted. 
We must build upon our own distinctive doctrines, 
worship according to our own Orders of Service, 
be governed by our own polity, and cultivate our 
own form of Christian life. The secret of the 
failures of some men in the Lutheran ministry, is 
that they have never understood the peculiar 
spirit of the Lutheran Church, and could not, 
therefore, build up Lutheran congregations. The 
secret of the lack of success of many congrega- 
tions is that they have attempted to provide for 
Lutheran people according to measures that they 
have seen practiced with seeming success in other 
denominations. The proper rule for Churches as 
well as for individuals, is: 'Be yourself, if you 
would gain respect.' This is especially true, when 
consistency involves no disgrace, but is the high- 
est honor."* 

Another error of great significance to be 
avoided in the future, is our neglect to hold the 

* The Lutheran, April 8, 1893. 



224 

great municipal centres. Our principal strength 
is in the smaller towns and country, and our chief 
weakness is in the great cities. And as those 
cities are the very heart of the nation, whence 
the currents of life and influence radiate in all 
directions, those who control them hold the keys 
of the future. We have the country; we have 
large numbers ; what should now be our aim is 
to have strong Churches in the leading municipal 
centres. This will give our Church that promi- 
nence, wealth, culture, and influence, which are 
invaluable aids to denominational prosperity, 
piety, usefulness, and power. 

Profiting, thus, by her sore experiences in the 
past, and improving, by liberality and zeal, the 
exceptional opportunity and responsibility given 
her, the future for the Lutheran Church in this 
land is a most auspicious one. It must be borne 
in mind also that the conditions are far more 
favorable to her now than they formerly were. 
Her German origin, once a hindrance and re- 
proach, now that the German mind is the acknowl- 
edged intellectual master and preceptor of 
civilization, is a credit and stimulus to her. For 
a long period of our country's history, too, the 
predominance of the Puritanic type in American 
Christianity was most unfavorable to an historic 



225 

and liturgic Church. But the wonderful change in 
this respect, so that the whole tide is setting power- 
fully in favor of theChurchly denominations, makes 
that which once was a detriment now a signal ad- 
vantage. The historic Church, the Church whose 
faith and practice are rooted in the past, it now 
appears beyond all doubt, is to be the Church of 
the future. For as there is a spiritual unity binding 
together the Christian ages, so in the true Church 
of Christ universal, past, present, and future, must 
meet in one. And as the Lutheran has the best, 
and richest, and most glorious history, this is a 
vital point in her favor. 

Moreover, as the Lutheran Church gave to the 
world that boon of civil and religious liberty, 
which is the peculiar glory of our institutions, 
the genius of Lutheranism is especially adapted 
to the spirit of, America. And, as then, the 
Lutheran Church was the founder of the pure 
phase of modern Christianity, so let us trust that 
in the very forefront of those Christian columns 
which are here, under the euidance of God, 
working out the last and highest problems of 
human destiny, will gleam the standard of our 
beloved Evangelical Lutheran Church. 



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